Much has been written about the over-hyped launch and quick 'trashing to bin' of so-called Google Killer
Cuil. What got them all the bad press was their over-hype on their index count and the Google Killer claim which failed to impress anyone.
But, hey life is all about failures and learning. Here are 7 'Killer'(ok, ok I'll grow up from this:) Tips, which can still give
Cuil a second chance at their Google-killer claim ...almost:
1. The accordion thing is a good idea to start with - but minus the current un-focused keywords on it. My search for '
london hotels' showed such options to expand as 'Building & Structures in Westminster'. While Westminster is very much part of London, why not focus on the keyword searched. Better options could be '
star hotels in london', '
central london hotels', '
greater london hotels', '
budget london hotels', or '
luxury london hotels' - all of them very closely focused on the searched keyword.
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2. For a search for '
london hotels' why bother showing a result with title highlighting Sydney, Singapore and Hongkong? The image is also unrelated to London by any stretch of imagination.
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3. The page-numbers in blue are almost invisible. Why not put this in same background as on this top horizontal bar?
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4. Again, same as Point 1 above. For your own brand, you should be able to drum-up some good tags like, '
What is Cuil?', '
How to search on Cuil', '
Cuil board of directors', '
What's Cool about Cuil' or some such stuff. Now look at the screenshot I have in here - what a shame!
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5. Having images directly in search result is a good idea, but only when it's directly related to the keyword searched. Now what is image of
Sania Mirza doing on a search result on '
Tata'? Couldn't you get any images of Ratan Tata or others? If you can't show related images - just avoid it altogether. Make it sensible.
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6. Please do something about this '
No Results Found' message. C'mon, you are a search engine which claimed to have a bigger index than Google, and you couldn't locate this keyword which is also a domain name for 7 years! Try google for the same search(2,030 results) So, hype is OK, but only as long as you show something to go with your claim.
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7. For a search for a city(
bengaluru), what made you show me a furniture store site as the first result? Tweak your algorithms to return better results on such keywords - a wikipedia result on top would have saved your face.
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As we saw above, Cuil goofed up on three fronts:
# They didn't fine-tune their algo to return impressive search results.
# They over-hyped the entire thing as Google-killer
# They forgot that displaying better search results is far more important than the size of index.
Hope Cuil has learnt it's lesson and is back on it's drawing board to make a comeback plan. We ARE waiting ;-)
