I have mentioned in the past that Google has a tremendous advantage in search over Microsoft and Yahoo! because it is able to focus better as it has less going on. If that were true, now that Google has become as much of a web portal as Yahoo, a new competitor Cuil, which made a big splash in the search engine market some months ago, should be kicking Google in the rear.
As TechCrunch reports, the new search engine is really not doing well at all and comes up short on searches for TechCrunch. By the way, I wasn't impressed when I "Cuiled" TMC or Tehrani.
The company got $33 million in funding which I would argue is woefully inadequate to compete with Google. You would need to add at least a zero to the above number for me to think there was any competitive chance. And even then you are way behind Google which has been analyzing search behavior for almost a decade and has enough of a data repository to make it very difficult to catch.
Will Cuil find the hundreds of millions it needs to compete with Google over the long run? In this market, the answer is probably not and as some sample searches point out - if it can't find results accurately on the web, the company is likely not going to find the financial benefactors it needs either.
And this is perhaps a major shame as now more than ever there are cries in the tech industry that Google is becoming too powerful. But the web is the ultimate democracy (well except in some countries where certain sites are outlawed) and the population votes with its mice on what sites it wants to visit.
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Great,
love this site.
Ben
I like to kick google in rear too. I will embrace you Cuil.
Cuil, you go man. I will give you helping hand to kick his butt.