07
2008
How Cuil is This?
We received numerous requests to update the daily chart from our last post on Cuil. As expected, as the initial media hype subsided, traffic to the upstart search engine has declined precipitously.
As of this Tuesday, August 5th, Cuil.com ranked as the #1034 most visited website amongst all websites, and in the #34 position in our search engines category. We are also getting basic demographic data and lifestyle (Mosaic) segmentation on visitors to this new engine. The site is skewing male (64.4%) and here’s an interesting tidbit, the largest age segment of visitors is 55+ (36.3%). This is probably due to the influx of traffic from news sites covering the search engine’s launch.
In my next post on Cuil, we’ll examine the Mosaic types that are visiting the site.
That’s the observed traffic log shape that I see almost exactly – my blog got 4.25% of its traffic on launch day from cuil, and now it’s back at 0.25% of its traffic from that source from that past week (which is to say in the level of random noise).
Too bad they missed the mark so badly on the product. That level of attention is tough to get.
In these days, using “Google killer” becomes a fashion. Every company is using this term for publicity. Cuil might have got some publicity but lost credibility. Fastest death among internet startups.
Fascinating decay curve. Makes me wonder what sort of curve Live Search Cashback is on.
They have a great product. Just needs more work. I hope it succeeds.
It’s really sad to see a couple of people with such potential, launch a product that was in such a poor state at the time of it’s launch. If they would have learned anything from being a part of Google, you would have thought that Cuil would have at least launched in beta (whether a true limited beta or a Googlesque never-ending beta).
Launching a search engine with questionable results in a Google dominated environment is as foolish as launching an everything-to-everyone e-commerce site to compete with Amazon.
In a time where everything circulates so quickly over the Internet, via Twitter and Facebook, you can lose your launch opportunity very quickly. The graph above is proof of this.
I still cant figure out why media gave so much coverage to cuil without even testing it at least 5 minutes before writting the articles.