Cuil - An Over Hyped Money Pit
Cuil, what was dubbed to be the search engine that finally takes down Google. Everything sounded great; a team of ex-Google employees, $33,000,000 in venture capital, no IP addresses recorded and even a funny name.
Cuil went live on the 28th of July 2008, it has a really rocky start. The pages loaded slow, but this was because they had over 50 million searches which is more than Microsoft’s Live Search gets.
I tried out a few searches. I came up first for my own name, which is a good sign, but some of their results are somewhat lacking. I found a few spam results, bad ebooks and just keyword pages designed to trap spiders. Now, they claim to have the most indexed pages out of any search engine in the world. However, this is probably because of the immense number of spam and bad quality pages, which Google doesn’t have.
Cuil doesn’t have an image search, but this may be because they have combined image and web search. If you search in Cuil you will be greeted with both normal results alongside normal results. The results page is tabular, with results not going straight down like Google but across and down. So in Cuil you get a page of results that go vertically and horizontally, but in these results are also images and small thumbnails.
The idea of image and web search combined it good, but sometimes on a slow connection you don’t want to see images and sometimes you will only want to see images.
So, Cuil have spent $33 million on a search engine. It is ok, but needs some changes made to make it anywhere near a threat to Google.
Branding - An Essential for a Website or Business
Branding is an essential for your company or website if you want to become popular and well known in your field. When I relaunched my blog, I got a custom logo made. It only cost me $20 in a logo contest. For this $20 I got an amazing logo along with a new designer who is continuing to do work for me.
If you want people to remember your website or company, you need to offer them something special to remember you by. A unique a dazzling logo is perfect. When someone visits a website they will probably see your logo first. If it catches their eye, they will remember it.
Using a template logo or a bad quality logo will make you look like a normal company that has just not spent much. For a relatively low price, you can get a brandable and beautiful logo that will make people remember your website.
For this reason, I have spent some more money to get a designer to make a new logo for CompuTalk as well.