Cuil, the Cool Search Engine… Oops
Happy New Year! Marketing Technology finds and reports on the latest technology that will enable your business to effectively market to your audience, for acquisition or retention strategies. Subscribe now the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You'll 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.