Cuil, correctly pronounced as “cool”, is a fresh face in the search scene - one that has promised to be a major contender against Google, the search engine giant that literally overshadows all of its direct competitors with its gargantuan, digital footprint. While Cuil maintains somewhat noteworthy bragging rights because its founders are former Google employees and because the hype surrounding the launch of Cuil search caused its servers to overload time and time again, does Cuil really have what it takes to become the “Google-killer”?

Shaky start

When Cuil launched earlier this week - there were widespread reports of outages and completely irrelevant results. In fact, on day one we tried several different searches for common terms and were faced with “not found” messages galore amongst the mess of blatant spam pages and expired domains. Now, to be fair - it was the first day and Cuil’s engineers were not prepared for the influx of traffic that the new search engine received. So, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

What Cuil offers

Google is well-known for its ranking algorithm based mostly on the popularity of a web page, link popularity to be exact. Cuil endeavors to take the old-school route by purportedly relying on a web page’s content to rank it. While this is how search engines first started out back in the olden days of search startups, most search engines tweaked their ranking algorithms to rely less-heavily on on-page factors simply because rankings were too easy to manipulate. Whether Cuil can take the old-school search and twist it into a workable format, that’s something that remains to be seen.

Is Cuil the Google Killer?

Based on the performance of the search engine this week so far - it’s not likely to happen anytime soon. However, even if Cuil is able to overcome their mostly negative launch, the truth of the matter is that Google is a household name in a world that predominantly internet-literate. Our generation has grown up with Google as our home page and it’s unlikely that the majority of computer users will cede their home pages nor search habits to Cuil. Sure, there will be some cross over, but in our opinion - if Cuil is really to become a major contender against Google, it won’t be this generation that helps it achieve that status.

While Cuil had a less-than-stellar entry into the online marketplace, because of all of the hype surrounding this new search engine - it’s worth taking a look at and maybe even keeping tabs on.