cosinity blog

From TechCrunch today:

[From How To Lose Your Cuil 20 Seconds After Launch]

For the last 3 weeks or so I’ve had some people asking me why I’m waiting so long to get page2call released. From their perspective it was better to get it out and start the marketing/pr cycle as fast as possible… after all we’d have time to add/fix everything “later”.

Cuil is a cautionary tale about what happens when your primary business BECOMES PR and Marketing instead of creating solutions that deliver real results for your customers:

The hype cycle now lasts less than a day. Take yesterday’s over-hyped launch of stealth search startupCuil, which was quickly followed by a backlash when everyone realized that it was selling a bill of goods.

This is a perfect example of why I am so committed to ensuring that what we do delivers for you… I’m perfectly happy to let that be the hype about cosinity…

more of the TechCrunch article after the jump…

The hype cycle now lasts less than a day. Take yesterday’s over-hyped launch of stealth search startupCuil, which was quickly followed by a backlash when everyone realized that it was selling a bill of goods. This was entirely the company’s own fault. It pre-briefed every blogger and tech journalist on the planet, but didn’t allow anyone to actually test the search engine before the launch.

The company’s founders have a good pedigree, and have developed a unique way to index the Web cheaply and at massive scale. But creating a big index is only half the battle. A good search engine has to bring back the best results from that haystack as well. Here Cuil falls short, as we pointed out an hour after the site launched and we could actually check it out.

The story quickly turned from Google-killer to Google’s lunch (make that an amuse bouche). The results Cuil returns aren’t particularly great, and sometimes completely off the mark. For instance, a search for “Cuil” doesn’t even bring up a link to itself on the first page of results. (See screen shot at end of post).