Living the Cuil Life

As Corey had posted earlier in the week, Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is the new search engine that will ultimately try to compete with Google, especially when the company is made up of ex-Google and IBM employees. Who doesn’t want to try and get their 5 minutes of fame competing with the enormous search giant? Well, it may appear that their 5 minutes may be even more short lived than once though… hit the bump for the rest of the story!

Slashdot has a short story from PcPro that talks about the inner workings of Cuil, and by inner I mean actually working for Cuil.

Matt Sparkles wrote that in the initial launch of Cuil, there were a lot of issues with searches returning no hits when there clearly should be (Matt points out examples like the Iraq war, and has pictures on his PcPro site). There were also issues of simple searches returning with pornographic material, even when the safe filter was turned on. Obviously, this presents a major problem and with press making a big deal about this search engine, it really hasn’t been all that it is hyped up to be.

Sure, it hasn’t even been a full week since the site’s full release, but if you are trying to impress and take a cut of the competition, you really need to stand out and bring an innovative product to the world that is so Google minded. So how will Cuil do that with less than $25 million in venture capital funding left? Well, that answer many not be as clear as it once was…

As Matt reported:

Sarah Carey, The Sunday Times columnist, also works for Cuil, and recently posted on her personal blog about how quickly the company is burning through this VC cash. The post has since been removed, but thanks to Google’s caching feature (not available on Cuil), the post can still be read here.

What is interesting about Sarah’s blog is that it doesn’t seem to be any different than what Google has operated on. Google is an enourmous company that prides itself on taking care of their hard working employees with great benefits, free food (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks), great office environment (see Zurich, London, Michigan, NYC, and San Francisco) and a flexible work schedule (as long as your work is done). It seems as though Cuil is following the same mantra (as they should being former Google employees). But is it too soon to start living and working the life as a successful search engine company?

Sarah is quoted:

In our little company there are about 25 staff, over a dozen of whom have PhDs. Attracted to Stanford from all over the world, these are some of the smartest people on the planet. Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area.

The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves.

While this may be good for 25 employees, I still question their work ethics and the future direction for Cuil. While Cuil was released with 25 employees working on it, what if they had more employees and decided to cut back on some of the perks? Would they be better off now with a larger team? Every one knew what was at stake when Anna Patterson and her husband left Google. So why did they maintain such a high employee morale when they should have worked harder on their deliverables (here is the business side of me)?

Take a look at this site by CornetDesign. It gives you the option to search in both Google and Cuil. Type in something simple like “World of Warcraft” (yes, I’m that much of a geek). What do we find?

Google vs. Cuil

The first link is exactly the one I was looking for on Google, yet it was the 3rd link on Cuil… let’s try one more: technewsmadesimple :-)

technewsmadesimple search

Hurray! Google found it, but Cuil didn’t :-( So what does this say about Cuil? They aren’t finished yet, period. We should give them a couple of months more to really get their searches into gear and then check back. Hopefully, they will still have some of that VC money left to pump up their engine.

What do you think of the new Cuil? Leave us some feedback because we’d love to know! And by the way Google, I’m in Cambridge and I’d love so see your office!