I would hazard a guess as to some of the reasons Cuil has not taken off in the competitive search business:
- Wow, a huge index list? That’s nothing unless you can display results in an accurate and relevant list. Google has had 8 or so years to develop technologies like Page Rank, and it is innovations like this that place Google at the top of the pack when it comes to search.
- Search is a critical technology which is required to use the Web. It demands efficiency, clarity. It is not a function which can be sold to people through a pretty Web 2.0 interface.
- There are so many other superb Google web products (maps, image search, gmail etc) that all their popularity and success is boosted by each other. People are more likely to put all their eggs in one basket, especially when that basket is such a free, functional one. Additionally, people trust Google and it has a brand image in a very positive light.
- Google’s search functionality and feature list – features of advanced search, like searching for specific file types, and from certain domains are excellent. These features are also available with commands like ‘filetype:xls’. You can type something like “time in california” or similar, when you can’t be bothered doing a time zone conversion, and Google will just tell you the answer! It’s the same with calculations. Along with suberb image search, scholar search and others, Google’s search feature set is not even worth comparing with Cuil’s.
When you put these and other factors together, it comes down to one simple thing; For users to switch to a c ompeting product, there has to be significant benefit to using the competing one. Google has so much going for them right now, that this would seem impossible for a new company to accomplish. Cuil had a slim chance with it’s huge index size, but this was obviously not enough.
Yet, Cuil is founded by former Google employees, so I wouldn’t lose complete hope that they might come out with something not only interesting, but successful some time in the future.
It was not very hard to resist the temptation of adding yet another Cuil/Cool pun headline to the internet.