Cuil, the Google Killer is not so Hot (Anymore)- Losing all the initial interest?
The much-hyped ‘Google’ killer’ it seems is losing all the initial interest it generated with it’s ‘killer’ positioning as world’s largest search engine index.
While bloggers went around talking about the (ir)relevance of the search results, one thing came out clearly – the world needs another Google. The world needs another new ‘cuil’ search engine (with a diff. ‘evil’ tagline, maybe?).
Statcounter, the site analytics tool followed Cuil’s growth and here are some interesting stats of % searches performed using Cuil relative to the total number of searches performed (total sample for the period of over 365 million page views globally).
- Jul 29: 0.10%(1 in 1,000),
- Jul 30 : 0.11%
- Jul 31: 0.08%
- Aug 03: 0.04%
- Aug 06 : 0.03%
- Aug 08 : 0.02%
- Aug 10: 0.01% [source]
The site was launched on July 28th, saw the peak on the 3rd day and is now in a not so ‘cuil’ position. Hope the future doesn’t follow this ‘almost linear‘ scale.
If you are a startup, one thing that you should learn from Cuil is the ‘Art of Product Positioning’ :
While there are other ‘Google killer’ out there, everybody’s attention turned to Cuil, because of their strong positioning as world’s largest search engine index.
Cuil almost sounded like the right alternative, the next Google – just that they didn’t live up (so far) to the expectations.
What’s your opinion?
It’s your fault when you launch yourself as “google killer”. Before you launch yourself, don’t YOU know that no matter how big index you have, you don’t have good enough searching, ranking algorithm that matches even say yahoo or live, forget Google. With your position, you’d rather start with stealth and then based on the feedback, you’d gain and then call yourself google killer. Higher the expectation, higher the burden and when you can’t lift the burden, you break your back and that’s the problem with cuil.
Four words: Under promise over perform – maybe nobody told them that?
what happened Ashish? why have you suddenly started covering international start ups
? I was under the impression that pluggd.in solely focused on domestic start ups or may be if you are trying to draw lessons then it’s different story altogether. may be web2.0 marathon is loosing it’s sheen in India. what do you think?
@poseidon It’s not about a US product or an Indian startup!
I understand your concern over the coverage – but as you said, it’s about the lesson
> +ve thing being product positioning.
> -ve part is ofcourse the execution.
Many startups are doing a good job of execution, but aren’t able to position themselves clearly – Cuil solved this problem and to me, it was a huge success (after all, how many bloggers have talked about other ‘google killers’?)
We do stay in the context (of domestic startups)
but at the same time, it’s really important to take a leaf out of Silicon Valley – where the real ‘tech’ action is!
-Ashish
@Nishit – agree with you fully here. I wonder, weren’t the Cuil team aware of the fact that their search results weren’t up to scratch? Given the pedigree that these guys have, I cannot quite believe that they made this move. *Surely* they were well connected with top bloggers / pundits etc, and *surely* they got some solid feedback (which should have alerted them to their failings). So what’s the real story? What went down?
They had all the makings of a ‘remarkable’ product – indeed *everybody* wanted them to succeed. At the end – despite their great positioning, they didn’t(check out my Book Review of Purple Cow – Seth Godin’s guide on how to make your product remarkable here: http://www.moneyvidya.com/blog/?p=305)
Gautam Kshatriya
gautam.kshatriya@moneyvidya.com
http://www.moneyvidya.com
@Poseidon
To Deliver this Message :”If you are a startup, one thing that you should learn from Cuil is the ‘Art of Product Positioning’ :”.
KEY CONCEPT after all.
Not even a Google-Like product can beat Google unless bundled with strong cognitive science expert research.
A fundamental is that Google is beyond the relevant results. It is now more about re-capturing the behaviour of their loyal community base.
Guys, I guess the caption “Google killer” for “cuil” has been created more of a word of mouth & viral phenomenon, and the search engine never positioned itself as a google killer.The main reason why people assumed it as a healthy google competitor is, the reason being that top google engineers have started “Cuil”.
cheers:-)