Summary
It does seem like history revisited. Google came in and soon became the king of search engines relegating Yahoo to the second spot and Microsoft behind it. Cuil has a good start now but is no where near the point where they may overthrow Google.
Analysis
I personally want to see Cuil succeed but this is only so as to spur innovation in this area. It now seems that just having a search engine business model may not be enough to make money to sustain in the long run.
I am not so sure that Cuil has the right business model here. Their claim that they will not retain information about user’s search histories and surfing patterns is noble but isn’t this critical from a profitability standpoint. Keeping track of customer behavior is the foundation of long-term sustainability.
Cuil needs to refine their searches a bit more to provide meaningful results. I do like the layout that seems different that Google but sometimes the layout seems distracting. Many a times, Cuil returned duplicate results. None of these are major issues and will improve with time.
Bottom line, Cuil has a good start and will start challenging Google and Yahoo in the search engines arena. Cuil still has a long way to go and only time will tell whether they are here to stay or will fizzle out.
