Self proclaimed Google killer Cuil has introduced real time search as part of a range of changes the company hopes might bring customers back.

The new feature offers a “real time” popup box that promises to show real time results on demand. It sounds appealing in theory, but so was Cuil itself before it launched.

There’s no way to sugar coat this feature: it’s bad. As in someone has had a bet and is playing a joke on the general public by launching it.

The box above shows “real time” web results for Gnomedex. There’s 13 results spanning 10 hours. In FriendFeed as I’m typing this the “real time” stream for Gnomedex (which started last night) is pumping, and Gnomedex has been a trending term on Twitter all day. Cuil manages to find 13 results. In Google, there are 36,000 results for Gnomedex in the last 24 hours, and even Google Blog Search delivers 181 results.

Mashable has a more positive take on Cuil realtime fail search here.

Related posts:

1. Cuil: Interesting, but not so cool for research
2. QLOL: It’s not bad, it’s Cuil!
3. Cuil Not So Hot Any More

Remember Cuil? If you don’t remember what Cuil does you might however remember the name: Cuil has become a regularly used adjective to describe a hyped product that epically fails to meet expectations.

If you do remember Cuil you might be surprised to know that it’s actually still going…well if you can call it that. From its initial launch spike Cuil has quickly faded and never recovered. For a company with $33 million in funding that promised to be the next Google, the stats aren’t great. Alexa ranks the site at 12,871…that’s 4,000 worse that what we rank in Alexa, and this site was funded on the smell of an oily rag and several cartons of red wine. Their traffic chart isn’t any prettier either:

Compete is showing an internal server error as I type this post so I can’t grab the stats there, but the toolbar server is still up and gives Cuil a rank of 17,944. Quantcast doesn’t direct measure the site, but even allowing for that the numbers are embarrassing:

There simply can’t be a business case on these numbers: even if they managed to get premium rates on advertising there’s still not anywhere near enough page views to cover the running costs Cuil would have with sales, engineers etc.

Greylock Partners, Madrone Capital Partners and Tugboat Ventures must be getting close to pulling the pin: the longer Cuil operates the more of their $33 million is lost, and the resale value of the assets wouldn’t be all that great either…after all, who would want to buy a failed search engine.

Related posts:

1. Cuil: Interesting, but not so cool for research
2. Wolfram Alpha: I can’t believe it’s not Cuil!
3. Cuil insults Helen Keller, is their target market adolescent boys?

The problem with an intense hype campaign is that high expectations are often hard to meet in reality. When the search engine Cuil launch in 2008, it claimed among other things it was going to be a Google killer, and instead became a noun used to describe a hyped service that fails on execution.

This years Cuil will be decided at the end of the year, but the leading candidate by a long way in undoubtedly Wolfram Alpha.

The “computational knowledge engine” that promised to revolutionize the world launch Friday Saturday…actually, I’m not sure. It didn’t launch Friday night despite a live web cast that dragged on for hours that was suppose to detail the launch. It possibly launched Saturday, least it’s working now….well, if you call it that.

The idea behind Wolfram Alpha is a sound one: an engine that can deliver usable data, as opposed to search results like Google. However, the execution lacks on a couple of fronts. The main one is data, or specifically lack of data. Simply data queries come up blank, for example asking for the population of Victoria, Australia delivers the population of Hong Kong and Australia…but not Victoria. The capital of Victoria, Australia…nothing (Google: Melbourne). Victoria Australia as a query…nothing (Google: Wikipedia entry, official tourist site, pictures). Where you do get data, it’s old. For example Population of Canberra offers stats from 2004 (Google 2008). It’s not an Australian stats thing either: population of Palo Alto came back with 2004 figures as well (Google no direct answer, did link though to sites.)

Then there’s the depth problem. If statistics and numbers are where Wolfram is suppose to shine, you’d expect there to be decent time depth to numbers. There isn’t. GDP for the United States stops dead at 1970. Stock prices don’t seem to go back far at all (a search for IBM at a set date in 2006 came up blank.) Where I’d hoped this would work was in statistical analysis, but you can’t compare stats that aren’t in the system.

There are some things it does reasonably well. Straight mathematical calculations are easy, and obtaining basic information to basic questions, things like a weather forecast, star charts etc. The thing though is that although Wolfram presents some of this data in a more interesting way, many of these things can be obtained from Google. In fact, Google gives nicer graphics on a weather forecast.

Then there’s the uptime/ speed issue. As I type this at 1:30am Pacific time, I’m constantly hitting error messages on Wolfram telling me they’re overloaded. When I don’t get the message, it’s slow. Maybe not tediously slow, but a lot slower than Google. When playing with Wolfram for fun, not a big issue, but if you tried to use it regularly, I’m betting it would become painful.

It is early days yet with Wolfram Alpha, but it’s important to remember that 12 months later Cuil is only remembered for the complete let down their hype was. Wolfram so far is heading in the same direction.

Related posts:

1. Cuil Not So Hot Any More
2. How long now until Cuil is put out of its misery?
3. Cuil insults Helen Keller, is their target market adolescent boys?

Hitwise mapped out the startup’s traffic from its first days until now. The chart speaks for itself:

The site’s dropped to number 34 in search engine traffic, according to Hitwise data. Analysts also found the bulk of its current users are 55 or older.

Not too Cuil.

(Image: Hitwise Intelligence)

Related posts:

1. Cuil: Interesting, but not so cool for research
2. Cuil insults Helen Keller, is their target market adolescent boys?
3. How long now until Cuil is put out of its misery?

New search engine Cuil has an interesting way with images, offering inappropriate and/ or completely wrong images with its search results. It’s not bad, it’s Cuil!

More: The World According to Cuil, Google Blogscoped. Ex-Googlers reinvent web search (NSFW), The Register.

Related posts:

1. Cuil: Interesting, but not so cool for research
2. Cuil Not So Hot Any More
3. Cuil insults Helen Keller, is their target market adolescent boys?

New search engine Cuil is pushing tasteless blind jokes into search results for Helen Keller.

A search for Helen Keller on Cuil delivers “Helen Keller jokes” as a recommended primary search tab. Following the link displays jokes (on Cuil itself) such as “how did helen keller burn the side of her face? she answered the iron. how did she burn the other side? they called back.”

On the first page of results, Cuil’s “category” option bundles Helen Keller into “American child actors” and “American Anarchists” without explanation.

Could Cuil’s target market be adolescent boys who may like this sort of rubbish, or is it simply a case of Cuil being perhaps so fundamentally flawed as a search engine that it risks the wrath of the disability lobby?

Related posts:

1. Wait- who was Helen Keller and what’s her dance like?
2. Cuil Not So Hot Any More
3. QLOL: It’s not bad, it’s Cuil!

On top of an index that some is suggesting is bigger than Google, Cuil seeks to differentiate itself through data grouping. For example this search for Berlin offers immediate results, then what it thinks are related results via tabs, such as Irving Berlin, Berlin Wall and more. Some search results also offer a right hand box category option that groups the search term, for example in a vanity search for myself, it offers categories of Australian Bloggers…then oddly TechTV, American Bloggers, Gawker Media and G4 Hosts and Staff.

First impressions is that the interface, that includes extracts from each link, is user friendly. The tabs/ groups aren’t perfect, but they are a reasonable way to navigate when they work.

The problem is that the search results don’t always compute. A search for The Inquisitr doesn’t show this site on its first page, second page, or third page, and then just runs out of pages. However, there are multiple references of The Inquisitr on Techmeme (7), FriendFeed (3) and The Blog Herald (3) in the result. There appears to be no smart grouping like you see on Google, so that where there are multiple results on the one site, you get a primary and secondary link only, in one result. Instead each result gets its own, complete with text extract spot. This is only one example, but I’d hate to be using Cuil for serious research only to get the same reference listed multiple times on the same sites over and over again: as a search tool it is most definitely not cool.

It appears I’m not the only one seeing issues with Cuil. Chris Brogan can’t find himself in Cuil, despite an established presence online. At the time of writing, Cuil seems to be teetering on fail as traffic hits the site, either that or it can’t find Louis Gray.

No related posts.