Web Design Ireland

Cuil running a little hot

Cuil, a new search engine founded by Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, launched flopped on the web today with many users experiencing nothing more than a server error page, or non existant results.

The site has gained some major traffic over the past few hours, after the launched story featured on ZDNet and Wired amongst others around the blogosphere, resulting in a traffic spike that they failed to cope with.

Costello hails from Drogheda, and the product name comes from a play on “Cool” and Cuil being an old Irish word for knowledge.

Cuil’s search index spans 120 bn web pages, but Google have said they believe their index is larger. However as we all know, search is much more than just about size, its all about relevancy, and from an initial play about with it, I haven’t been terribly excited. Yet again another search startup that has major teething troubles on launch. Error pages (i received a “server running hot” message), and non existant terms in the index. I’m guessing that due to the major traffic received they are now serving cached results such as a search for “ireland”, yet a search for “paul anthony ireland” yields no juice. I guess we’ll all have to see if it lives up to the hype over the next few days..but you never get a second chance to make a first impression.