Too Cruel To Cuil?

Search Engine Marketing

So it’s been a few days and we’ve had reaction here, here, here, here and here.

Oh and here, here, here, here and here, and my favourite being here!

image

Most, if not all the feedback and comments have been less than positive and I’m sure the management team have not been sleeping easy, nor have the investors.

I said on Monday we needed some time to assess the relevancy, and was reserving judgement as I’ve been involved in launching big profile products and it’s not for the faint-hearted!

So when is a good time to launch a new service with such huge press fanfare? How ready does it have to be?

I would suggest that it should be able to cope with a huge tug on servers, and that “about” & “feature” pages should return information and not 404 errors.

But what of the rest? What is the baseline for pushing the button? What are the “go/no go criteria”?

And how long will you give it before you try Cuil again?

Jul30

  • I do not like the fact that I can't use any sort of syntax to refine a search. I can't use quotation marks or minus or plus. 11 results per page with no preference to see more. No cached pages. No image searching. Very disappointing, but I will wait and see. I expect that ANY new search engine will have a rocky start. As long as their focus remains on being a search engine and they don't go into desktop searching programs or messenger programs or get into people's searching habits or intrude on privacy in general, I think they may actually do well and be a really good search engine in the future.
  • Fina
    I searched Cuil for "Rock Band 2 Song List" and it returned NOT ONE result having to do with the video game RB. It was just links to different rock bands and blogs about song lists.
    I Googled the same exact thing and recieved a hundred pages of nothing but the song list for RB2.
    So yeah. What is the point? Don't announce that you're better than Google and then suck way harder than even the search engine attached to my intranet at work.
  • Jack Wallington
    I like the layout but the results need to get much better very quickly! The server overload should have been anticipated but it's not the first website in the world to go down on launch. Agree with Paul about BETA.
  • Faced that dilemma when working for a casino, launch with reduced features or wait a few more months. In the end we launched without waiting but kept it fairly quiet, missing out on lots of publicity.

    Cuil needed a great big BETA button, and actively asked for feedback. Better to have no pages than broken pages :(
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