Cuil - Not so Cool

Today a new search engine was launched by 2 former employees of Google. The name is Cuil (pronounced "cool"). I gave the search engine a quick try this morning with some of the search terms I watch for myself and clients. The results, not so cool.

Searches for "search engine optimization," "internet marketing," and "rubber stamps" yielded the following message:

"We didn’t find any results for “insert-term-here”
Some reasons might be...a typo. Please check your spelling.
your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search."

When I tried the industry term seo I finally got results which included, in the "Explore by Category" tab - Korean Pop Singers??? Whoa! One search term I tried brought up relevant results with a totally unrelated reference to cNet software.

The result pages are laid out completely different than "normal" search engine with a three column format. The listings often include an image although I'm not sure how they are making a determination on image selection because often the images didn't seem to be related to the company or product represented - like it was just some random image from the site.

They people behind the search engine also stated that they had more pages indexed than Google . . . well apparently not if they are serving "not found" pages to typical terms.

My analysis - maybe it was launched too soon but right now Cuil is not so cool!!