Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Not Just Me

Others were as underwhelmed as I by yesterday's debut of Cuil. This from Time:



    Monday, Jul. 28, 2008

    Why Cuil Is No Threat to Google


    By Anita Hamilton


    Rest easy, Google ... The much-hyped new search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool"), purports to index more Web pages than any of its rivals. But based on its Monday debut, the new site poses little immediate threat to industry leader Google, or even its nearest competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, in either relevance or breadth of results it delivers.

    "Anybody who thought [Cuil] was this Google killer can really see now that no, that's not going to happen today — and the likelihood is that's not going to happen a year from now," says Danny Sullivan, internet search guru and editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.

    Despite its lackluster performance, Cuil (which means wisdom or knowledge in Gaelic) got so many visitors on Monday, that its servers crashed around 3 p.m. E.T. "Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again," the site read intermittently throughout the afternoon. But even when it was working, the results were fair, at best. Enter a keyword such as "mint" and the first result that comes up isn't the herb or flavor but the U.S. Mint. ...

Read the whole article here.


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