Cuil – Latest Stats

Hi folks,

Following on from your suggestions, we have been keeping an eye on the usage stats for the new search engine Cuil. Unfortunately, we have been watching a quick decline rather than a steep ascent to success!

Despite an impressive start, stats for Cuil have been falling steadily. It’s unfortunate that the engine couldn’t capitalise on the initial interest it generated following widespread media coverage, and it remains to be seen if and how Cuil plans to tempt many disgruntled users back to the site as the index improves. It looks like the folks at Cuil have some tough work ahead of them.

In the meantime, please find below the latest stats for Cuil – these figures show the % of searches performed using Cuil relative to the total number of searches performed.

Globally US UK
Jul 29 0.10%
(1 in 1,000)
0.11%
(1 in 1,000)
0.19%
(1 in 500)
Jul 30 0.11% 0.12% 0.19%
Jul 31 0.08% 0.09% 0.10%
Aug 01 0.06% 0.07% 0.10%
Aug 02 0.05% 0.07% 0.09%
Aug 03 0.04% 0.04% 0.08%
Aug 04 0.03% 0.04% 0.06%
Aug 05 0.03%
(3 in 10,000)
0.04%
(1 in 2,500)
0.05%
(1 in 2,000)
Aug 06 0.03% 0.03% 0.05%
Aug 07 0.02% 0.03% 0.01%
Aug 08 0.02% 0.02% 0.01%
Aug 09 0.02% 0.03% 0.01%
Aug 10 0.01% 0.02% 0.01%

Note: This information is based on a total sample for the period of over 365 million page views globally.

95 Comments

  1. Effectively, google’s web usage tracking is exactly what spyware does.

    I’ll continue to keep Cuil on my search engine list along with yahoo,altavista (one of the first) and others – particularly the regional search engines.

  2. Re “People need a reason to change search engines”

    There are plenty of good reasons to switch from google.
    Google now tracks everything one does on the web for a lot of people:
    * those that use firefox’ built-in anti-phishing feature, it means every URL you visit goes to google first,
    * google syndication and doubleclick engulfment can cover pretty the entirety of an unsuspecting person’s web behavior
    * people have somehow turned the verb “search” into “google” , adding more to the omnipresence of google

    Personally I’ve long been using yahoo and other so-called “B-List” search engines. Admittedly the results are not as good as google.

    But I believe in choice, and fair competitiveness and variety .

    I don’t and will not buy into this frightening “Google == WWW” trend.

    It may suit them and their shareholders , but it doesn’t suit the interest of privacy, innovation, fair market competitiveness .

    PS. Note , I don’t mind using google’s blogger services, because there are other blogging services that “on par” with their service.

  3. So it was only a traffic driven spike. Now that Cuil has become associated with failure, it will find it difficult to get any of that traffic back. It has to be better than Google and the rest. There is no “as good as” in the search engine business. People need a reason to change search engines and Cuil, as it stands now, is not providing any reason. It would be interesting to see a graph of Cuil’s traffic fall off to get some sense of search frequency versus time.

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  5. Thanks for the follow-up, StatCounter people. The results are not surprising at all, I must say. In a field dominated by Google, you have to be good right out of the starting gate or why would people go back?

  6. We include Cuil.com in our innovative multi search algorithm.

    2try4.com can save time by searching up to four popular sites at once, which proves excellent for research. A search provides four expandable screens (click the top grey bars), filled by top search providers.

    It is specialised for deep web research and has search models which range from !images to !video search.

    Our users are worldwide, however we are still very much a beta in appearance with basic help guides.

  7. I dont like Cuil but full credit to them for giving it a go. Competition is always good but I think David might just loose out to Goliath this time…

    From a personal point of view – I will be using Google as a search for Lamb Cam puts my site http://www.lambwatch.co.uk in second, whereas in Cuil it’s nowwhere to be seen ๐Ÿ˜›

  8. Cuil doesn’t seem to be ready for a public release yet. The system is working, and according to the owners, they can index MORE sites than Google. The results, however, are way less relevant than those found by other traffic exchanges! Really, Cuil finds the weirdest things sometimes. Not to mention the dark and gloomy website design isn’t really a good thing nowadays…

    However, I should probably wish them luck. Google founders started from nothing, and look at them now; these guys have equipment and their ‘secret’ algorithms. Only it’s incredibly more hard to get into the search engine market now ๐Ÿ™‚

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  10. Cuil is strange….It doesn’t even have most of the websites indexed and there is no where to go to add your website. I get tons of traffic from Google and other search engines but nothing from Cuil.

    Anyone have any suggestions on how to get added?

    I did a few searches for different topics and it came back with very poor results. Why would people want to use Cuil when it doesn’t index popular pages?

  11. Finally, the most ridiculously overblown “news story” in the history of online technology blows over.

    Why does everyone insist on wishing them “good luck” with these “horrible search results” that “need massive improvement”?

    There’s so much other promising stuff on the internet, and the media picks something that sucks from the get-go to harp on??!

    This company deserves no sympathy. You don’t release a product until it’s AT LEAST semi-usable. Surely they knew it wasn’t close to that.

  12. I thought they had some nice ideas, BUT then you do a search and most results are bad or just plain irrelevant.

    Cuil can’t compete with google or yahoo or live, hell they were the worst results I’ve seen in a long long time

    anyway best of luck to them

  13. I have a strong feeling
    Cuil was nothing but a google experiment, to see if a privacy-conscious competitor (fake competitor, i should add) would drive users away from google.
    Note also that yahoo.com did the same thing with Yuil – the similarity in names are not a coincidence.
    It is a serpentine marketing trick from google – setting up a fake competitor for a strong loss.
    The reason i say this is that their search results are simply too awful to be true.
    Further details here (though nothing to authenticate my hypothesis):

    http://letterfromtheplanetofapes.blogspot.com/2008/08/theres-something-about-cuil.html

  14. Failure for Cuil, but success for whatever marketing/pr firm got them their original hits. If it was a viral marketing project, then it worked.

    Anyone know who did it for them?

  15. If you are going to challenge the gods, you better be prepared. What’s funnier than the crap they built is that we all gave it a chance with some expectation. What a piece of cuil.

  16. Cuil is a successful failure. Ten seconds after visiting it I had to leave – it’s just ick.

  17. From the very first day that cuil was hyped in the media, it’s format foretold doom. I wonder if the investors were at all internet savvy?

  18. I found that the Cuil results were highly accurate, fresh and relevant to my searches!!

    Well, I did when I was looking to find expired domains, KW stuffed spam pages or wanted to be redirected to a porn site.

    But for anything else – not so much.

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