Cuil.com Search – A Startup Cautionary Tale

While there have been hundreds of startup search engine websites in the last few years, one such startup that actually started to gain momentum was Cuil.com. Going live in late July on 2008, Cuil was seen as a serious challenger in the industry and some experts thought that they could challenge Google eventually.

Cuil got much of its early fame due to its famous backers. Ex-Google employees Anna Peterson and Russell Power were joined by CEO Tom Costello, who formerly worked with IBM. Venture capitalists evidently also saw the potential and invested more than $30 million into the company.

When it launched, Cuil claimed to have the largest index of webpages of any search engine (more than 120 billion). But after an initial drive of traffic, Cuil’s problems began to surface. Users reported irrelevant and even inappropriate search results. Even worse, Cuil.com was oftentimes slow or totally unresponsive.

As a result of their issues, Cuil’s strong start began to evaporate. According to Compete.com, Cuil had in excess of two million unique visits in July of 2008. However, that number dropped by 80% by September and by more than 93% by March.

Although the search engine is still alive and kicking, Cuil is no longer viewed as a serious threat in the search engine industry. In fact, once their initial venture capital runs out, Cuil could very well be forced out of business.

What can startup companies learn? First of all, it’s important to do extensive testing prior to launching something as significant as a search engine. Additionally, any slowness or downtime can cause visitors to leave your startup website and never return. Too bad Cuil had to find out the hard way.

Can Cuil Survive? (Image: Cuil.com Screen Shot)