It can be lonely at the top. As a leader in your business, you have to battle those that want your spot. #1 can never rest because there is always someone that wants to take you down, to be in your chair, etc.
Google is the supreme search engine. There are other companies that say they are better. What does it take to beat Google? Perhaps someone who used to work there, who understands the strengths and weaknesses of Google.
This week a new search engine that was designed by a former Googlite went live. Cuil.com.
I tried it yesterday for a few minutes and was unimpressed. So did a lot of others with the same reaction.
At the top of this article are the results of a search I did a few minutes ago. (Click on the images to enlarge them).
The score: Cuil: Zero, Google: 343,000
Read more from Business Week and then click on the link at the bottom to read some of the comments.
Cuil: Another Google Challenger Launches--to a Cool Reception
Posted by: Rob Hof on July 28
Just weeks after the last highly touted Google challenger, Powerset, was snapped up by Microsoft, a new one is launching Sunday night. Cuil (pronounced “cool” and previously sporting an additional “l”), boasts a Web index three times the assumed size of Google’s (though I’m not aware of Google admitting to a particular index size lately), a management team with an impressive pedigree (several people from Google), a different set of algorithms that in part analyze the content of pages, and a radically different presentation of search results.
I haven’t had much chance to check it out, since it just launched, but a few searches I tried tonight do provide intriguingly relevant results in an interesting, magazinelike format. Before I opine on this, however, I’m going to spend a few days trying it out in more depth.
UPDATE: A number of people, including a colleague at BusinessWeek, are experiencing periodic outages of the service, receiving messages on the site that say “Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now.” It’s working for me. But outages like this aren’t a good sign for a long-planned service right out of the gate.
UPDATE 2: Yikes, look at those comments from readers below. Lots of people are not very impressed so far. And here’s a real ouch: Search on “Cuil” or even “Cuil search engine” and you don’t get any results that include Cuil.com itself.
Search wizard Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, not surprisingly, has the most complete analysis, and until I have a chance to dig deeper myself, I’d highly recommend his take. More at TechCrunch, GigaOm, and TechMeme.
Suffice to say that I agree with Danny that no matter how good it is, Cuil has a heckuva challenge getting traction against Google. And it’s not just because of people’s now-ingrained default to type “google.com” when they’re searching for anything. It’s that Google has so many resources to bring to bear on anything that they can see working for a rival that they’re not likely to let anyone steal a march for long.
That said, it’s reassuring that startups like Cuil are continuing to push the envelope. More than ever, Google needs credible competition, and Yahoo and Microsoft aren’t yet providing it, if they ever will. Any company with 65%-plus market share, still growing, can grow complacent no matter how hard its founders and management team try to avoid it. Competition is the best antidote to that.
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