Whew…
Wow. That was intense. Looking back at the first 48 hours since launch, it was quite an experience. After a lot of hard work, we were thrilled to begin offering our new approach to search. We were even more thrilled with the interest, and traffic, we received.
In fact, it was overwhelming—literally. While we had planned for a large number of searches on our first day, we hadn’t planned on more than 50 million. After all, that’s in the same ballpark as Microsoft’s Live Search and approaching Yahoo!. And they have a bit more infrastructure than our small start-up.
So for a good part of the first day, the traffic volume simply outstripped our ability to respond. Some machines failed. Some bugs were found. Some of our redundancies…weren’t so redundant. This meant some searches didn’t get the best results. Some didn’t get any.
And yet, for a lot of searches, Cuil did provide users with new results, different from the ones folks have gotten in the past, according to the reports we’ve received. This is one of our goals—to give people an alternative to existing approaches.
Thank you very much for the feedback. The emails we’ve gotten at feedback@cuil.com have been very helpful, telling us areas you enjoy—such as the layout and the search by category feature—and areas where we need to improve—image matching, for example. We read them, so please keep them coming.
At Cuil, we are tackling some of the big challenges in search, from finding ways to search more of the Web, to finding results by analyzing the content on a page, to providing images with our results to help you pick the page you want. These are difficult problems, and we know we have more work to do.
We are incredibly proud of what this small team of 30 employees has been able to build from scratch already, and we are committed to improving Cuil every day. Thank you for trying us out.
Tom, Anna and Russell