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Cuil frozen out: market share drops to next to nothing

Posted in Blog, Google, Internet on September 24, 2008 at 12:06 pm

When Cuil launched just a couple of months back on the 28th July, it jumped right in there with the ridiculous claim that it was already the biggest search engine on the planet right from the get go. This was, apparently, based upon some clever math which ended up with Cuil indexing some 120 billion web pages, or more than three times as many as anyone else. Even Google, which at around the same time stuck a tentative claim in for a trillion unique web pages identified during the automatic index creation process had to admit it only actually indexed a percentage of those in order to weed out the duplicates and dynamically generated content.

What Cuil did was mix claims of the biggest web index with claims of unique content-based relevance methods for the engine, and promised to go beyond link analysis and traffic ranking in order to provide quite simply ‘the ideal search engine.’

Sounds impressive, huh? And the fact that Cuil was the brainchild of former Google search index architect Anna Patterson and Stanford University search research pioneer Tom Costello could not hurt either. “By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods, we’ve built a more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it’s time search did too” Patterson exclaimed at the time.

Certainly that seemed to be the case at first, the publicity worked and the promise of a better-than-Google-search added up to a very quick carving out of a 0.26 percent share of the global search market. OK, so not something that would have Google executives quaking in their boots, nor shake the foundations of SEO the world over, but nonetheless impressive enough for a first 48 hours figure.

Yet Net Applications, the monitoring and measuring company which came up with those numbers has been keeping an eye on Cuil and now reports that things are not so hot, in fact they are positively icy cold. According to the latest figures for the end of August the Cuil market share has dropped to, well, just about nothing at all. Net Applications has the market share being a very meagre 0.01 percent. At least it is a very steady 0.01 percent though.

Why is this? Well I think I might know the answer: when compared to Google, Cuil search results are crap. A big steaming pile of crap in fact. I put it to a real world test after launch, going head to head against Google across a number of really very simple and very real world searches. The results were not just disappointing, they were devastating as far as Cuil was concerned. Other reviewers, bloggers, analysts and reporters were busy doing much the same and reaching much the same conclusions. That the technology behind Cuil might be impressive, the search index might be massive, the pedigree of the developers faultless, but the results were just not good enough. Certainly not good enough to switch from Google, not good enough to tarnish the Google brand one little bit in fact.

And those Net Applications market share numbers would seem to suggest that end users agree.

Not that everything is rosy for Google, because Net Applications has also announced a rather dramatic slide in popularity of the open source Google Chrome web browser. Chrome enjoyed a respectable one percent global market share within the first 48 hours, an unprecedented statistic. Now, though, it has slid down first to 0.85 percent last week and just 0.77 percent this. It seems like Chrome has been tarnished by one too many incidents involving security and stupid copyright grabs but above all else just does not deliver on the smaller, faster, safer promise. End users are, it seems, reverting back to Firefox and Internet Explorer, although Safari would appear to be doing best of all out of the Chrome migration.

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Comments

Comment by Justind Wright - September 24, 2008 on 3:14 pm

You do indeed raise some very valid points.

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Comment by George watson - September 24, 2008 on 3:49 pm

Personally I find I am slowly beginning to want to look elsewhere for search engines as google’s results return on average pages that are so obvious (like wikipedia) that its first page results are a waste. I am also disturbed that it has dropped so many pages from its index due to political pressure.

Re chrome:
I tried it and would have stuck with it if I could have tranferred all my firefox addons to it. I really need the separate thread per tab crash protection.
When chrome allows me to import all my firefox addons (which have become essential to my browsing experience) I will probably move to chrome.

Additionally I understand chrome will have some functionality with the new android cell phone applications which will mean when I get my new android phone I will have more reason to use chrome because I will be familiar with their cell phone applications.

Btw I like google a would hate to have to switch from them for search. I like that they provide great free tools like goolge earth and support them for that reason.

However I am disappointed that now googles search engine
1. Provides a lot of links to site that require you to pay to get the information without letting me know before I follow the link and I hate that.
2.google provides less deep links and so many obvious ones it is tougher to do deep detailed research with it than it used to be. I would guess 80.5 of all gogole search results now go to the same 20 or 30 domains with wikipedia being number 1. There is just less fun surprising discovery than there used to be.

Comment by Red - September 24, 2008 on 4:14 pm

I found that Cuil was horrible at finding websites for simple things like Leatherman or Gerber tools. Stick with Google or Yahoo.

Comment by Red - September 24, 2008 on 4:16 pm

Cuil was horrible at finding websites for simple things like Leatherman or Gerber tools. Stick with Google or Yahoo. Gear 5

Comment by smokeysmokey - September 24, 2008 on 4:20 pm

Lets wait for a final build before we judge Chrome. I don’t understand why anyone would even test it at this point.

Comment by Linux Guy - September 24, 2008 on 4:23 pm

It all started with a bad name… Cuil
Nobody can beat Google at this point.

Comment by druid.due - September 24, 2008 on 5:10 pm

I like Google’s Chrome. Unlike Internet Explorer, I can visit .ru domains and p*rn sites without worrying about my browser being hijacked by trojans and malware.

Comment by iSquidy - September 24, 2008 on 5:17 pm

Linux guy, you are spot on wiht that. Cuil. What the hell is that? It dates back to the dot bomb years when made up names were super cuil.

Comment by Bushmanbill - September 24, 2008 on 8:21 pm

Re Chrome:
The more the better for all I care. As long as my internet browsing experience gets better, I’m happy to see a browser tussle happen.

It’s evolution at it’s finest and I’m going to enjoy FF until something easier to use for the Mac comes up.

Comment by Donald - September 24, 2008 on 8:44 pm

http://www.satireandcomment.com/0808cuil.html

here is some satire on the very theme of Cuil quality

Comment by anonymous - September 25, 2008 on 1:38 am

don’t forget that…

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/cuils_twiceler_website_crawlers_causing_plenty_problems_websites

KILLS

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/is-cuil-killing-websites/

SERVERS

http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=338

Comment by Lee Woodman - September 25, 2008 on 10:39 am

Check out that alexa graph http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/cuil.com?q=

Comment by mr x - September 25, 2008 on 1:46 pm

try “kartoo.com” french - sweet results / return windows

Comment by David Walker - September 29, 2008 on 4:30 pm

Chrome doesn’t do things like allow you to adjust the column width of your customized columns on my.msn.com, and MP3 song samples at Amazon.com don’t play at all. Until Chrome can become functional, I can’t use it.

For the commenter who doesn’t like Google search results that are “obvious” and include Wikipedia, well, if those are obvious, they SHOULD be included. You could always search Wikipedia if it has the answers you need.

I also change my “results per page” from 10 to 50, and I can easily scroll down past the “obvious” results to the less-obvious ones. But the obvious results are generally the relevant ones, so what’s the problem?

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Comment by spiele - November 2, 2009 on 8:56 am

They are putting their heads back down to work hard because if they leave their keyboard they might be let go. Call it Survivor Cuil. You can’t kill Google you can only hope some day the DOJ will spilt it up into two companies, Google Search and I’m Feeling Lucky.

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