Cuil Turns out to be Not-So-Hot.

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed to get the latest news as soon as it is posted.

Just less than a year ago a new search engine named Cuil was released. It was heralded by many as the search engine that could finally be the “Google Killer”. Cuil’s search technology was said to be much more thorough than Google, and more respective of personal habits and search trends. While the latter is certainly true, Cuil does not collect user data or personal search history, their thoroughness remains to be debated.

A query for the ever popular search phrase “make money online” on Google returns three quality websites in the top three positions of page 1 of the SERPs with excellent content focused on assisting internet users accomplish their goal of making money online. The same query entered into Cuil returned much less reliable results including landing pages for clickbank affiliates and seemingly unrelated lenses and hubs from popular user generated content revenue sharing websites like Squidoo and HubPages. Rather than being more thorough and contextually relevant, it seems that Google holds the upper hand. It seems that if anyone were to figure out the Cuil formula, they could do a pretty good job of completely manipulating the Cuil SERPs – yet with a relatively low number of users on Cuil, the benefit to the SEO might not be worth the effort.

Cuil’s main selling point, as seen from their info page, is the fact that they are the largest search engine boasting a estimated index of 124,426,951,803 web pages. Check this out from Cuil themselves:

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. – Cuil.com

As it all turns out – bigger is not always better. Google is still at #1 and Bing (Microsoft) is pulling a close 3rd – as Cuil claims just a sliver of the .94% of the search engine market share split between all other companies not named Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, or Ask. While Cuil may not be the “Google Killer” this decade, they do have a pretty cool name.