Cuil Buzz is Going Cold Fast

Like a lot of people I was certainly interested to see what would come of this new company's launch. However, despite however big their index might get at some point, unless they get their relevant matching issues worked out they're going to have a very, very hard time gaining any significant market share.

I won't try to put together a slag-fest list out of sheer and continuing enthusiasm for there being more diversity of vendors in the space someday, so briefly, here are a few of the reasons why my gut says it's still way off the mark:

  1. The lack of operators for performing advanced queries makes it hard to do even simple things like find out if one's sites are even indexed or not. If users can't run advanced search queries, it implies that the matching engine internally is lacking in sophistication.
  2. The user interface is awkward, prompting an equal portion of left-to-right and top-to-bottom reading as opposed to erring in favor of one or the other.
  3. Aside from not returning authoritative results, the textual results are paired with image results that are on crack. Case in point (the info is about me but that's not my picture):

It feels like Myspace did in its early days: At what it does it could get big someday in terms of the amount of content and data it's both gathering and serving, but functionally it's starting off with fundamentals that feel clunky.

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