Cuil Traffic Cools Down

Homeostasis in the search world has returned to normalcy and last week’s much-hyped potential Google competitor has slipped back into relative Internet obscurity in terms of traffic. That’s not a bad thing, really. Cuil’s servers needed a break.

Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer reports that after an initial spike last week rocketing Cuil to a rank of 106 among websites at launch and grabbing over half a percent search share, the would-be dark horse has dropped 1034th in terms of traffic, and 34th among search engines.

But that means it’s still on the radar. Cuil will just be lower key, and, more importantly, lesser trafficked while the pedigree engineers make much, much needed tweaks and hope for a second chance.

Tancer’s other numbers are interesting. The majority (66%) of those using Cuil are male, which is not so surprising, historically speaking. Things get a little weird, though, when Tancer reveals that the largest age group using the search engine qualify for senior citizen discounts at Shoney’s.

He guesses it has to do with the number of news sites covering Cuil’s launch and directing traffic there still.

There are 3 Comments. Add Yours.

!st Real Estate Hosting
August 13, 2008 at 5:05 am

Classic case of PR hype without the content to back it up.

Wow! I thought when reading the claim made by Cuil in press release.

"120 billion Web pages, …….3 times more than Google index"

The only problem is most is spam and a large percentage seems to be from sex sites. Is that what they think the average visitor wants I wonder?

I look after in excess of 40 sites, most over 3 years old and many with 1000 plus pages of content. Cuil so far indexed only 5. Maybe I should be hosting more sex?

The thumbnail grabber they are using is flawed, and there are no tools for webmasters to check indexing.

At first look the pages look tight and professional, give it 3 months and I will be very surprised not to see the pages filled with flashing banners and 3rd part ads!

Anyway, thanks Cuil for taking the moral high ground over privacy and delivering a totally useless tool.
Bongski
August 10, 2008 at 8:08 pm

It’s expected, I hope CUIL gets more improvement sooner. Good Luck to them
Ray Richards
August 10, 2008 at 12:02 pm

I don’t think it’s at all surprising that a high percentage of older people were visiting Cuil. Older people have the money to invest, and if Cuil were going to be the next big thing (as many news sites were purporting), it would make a lot of sense to check it out for investment opportunities.

Problem is, Cuil sucks. Most of its returned results were way off and lead to spammy sites. So, I wouldn’t expect a large influx of captial anytime soon. The cat got out of the bag way too early… or their PR people got ahead of themselves here.