Cuil, the Cool Search Engine… Oops
Douglas KarrThanks for stopping by my personal blog on Marketing Technology! Over 50,000 visitors a month find my content worth returning for, so don't forget to subscribe to the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You may also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
I was trying out Cuil today, the new search engine, and I was going to add it to my list of search engines available in Firefox. However, they didn’t have a pre-made add-on ready so I was going to contact them and advise it.
That’s when it happened… the Cuil couldn’t find it’s own Contact Page. Oh, the terrible irony.
On a side note, the results on Cuil are very old and some of the pictures associated with the articles don’t even appear to have come from my blog. The output of the search engine is pretty cuil, though.
People tend to be very eager for publicity, and Cuil’s Google-ish DNA made it a media darling overnight. As with any PR surge, you’re going to have Twitter-like failures that swamp your service with negative reviews if you don’t have the bandwidth in place to support your traffic levels.
This is a critical component of web “launches,” and traffic expectations are something I see very few PR pros speaking about with their clients.