So you think you’re cuil?
It’s now been around four months since Cuil launched and rather than jumping to any instant opinions when it was just the newbie we decided to wait a few months to see how it took off. The other reason we’ve waited so long is that…well…we simply just forgot about it! After our initial visit or two way back in July we’ve simply just not bothered returning…
Since Cuil seems to now be ‘marbh‘ it is possibly a little late to be reviewing it but hey, it’s a blog post isn’t it!?
Any better at indexing?
Well, when Cuil first launched we ran a search on our own internet marketing company’s full URL, we got results that included “Steve Madden Sinfull (Red Patent) – Women’s – Outdoor.Zappos.com” and “Boys Green T-Shirt Next 3-6 Months”. Roll forward four months and although our URL is now being indexed there are still results such as “Florida Vacation Rentals, Vacation Homes, Vacation” on page one. Now, being under the impression that Cuil was developed to return more relevant searches than any other search engine it is difficult to understand why results such as this are being returned.
Given that our site is still returning such ridiculous results it doesn’t exactly encourage us to search for anything else on the assumption that other results will be just as irrelevant.
Does anyone even use it?
Another point to make is that after four months not one search query for our site or any of our clients has come through Cuil so is that an indication that no one is using it?
According to statcounter users of Cuil has dropped form 1 in every 1000 in July to 1 in every 10,000 in Aug and given that is it now Nov you can only imagine what the true figure now is. Has Cuil re-marketed itself as being so cool it’s elitist or have they failed in their bid to kill Google! I’m imagining it’s the latter…
What’s the word on the block?
As a final bit of research I searched for the term ‘does anyone use cuil’ – ironically I had to search through Google as there were no relevant results using Cuil. Google returned two forum posts both of which had very few replies (six in total) and the rest of the results were people complaining in blogs about the usability! It would seem noone is even talking about it any longer.
So what’s our opinion now?
Being an impatient lot, if something isn’t working we don’t tend to stay very long – first impressions and all that! So it is time for PoLR to say farewell, unless something huge happens to Cuil we just won’t be returning. Guess it’s back to Google… as if we ever left!
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