The Intersection of Online and Offline

A quick check of my iTunes library and you’ll see that in my favorites in Gwen Stefani’s “I Know We’re Cool.” Great song.

But seriously, folks, I know in the social media world, we’re Cuil.

I have waited a week or so to blog about the release of Cuil, a search engine launched and developed by some former Google people.  When it was launched, the social media world was a-buzz, and most people did that exact same thing that I did:

I opened a Google window and a Cuil window, entered a search term and let them spit out the results.

Here’s my two cents:

• No, Cuil did not return the same search results as Google, and the three column (adjustable to two column) format was a little confusing.  I tend to think that that is simply because I am familiar with the Google search result pages.
• The presentation of images and other media format was intriguing, but took a little while to figure out.
• It the FIRST WEEK OF THE PRODUCT LAUNCH.

Most of what I read was negative, in that folks were expecting a “Google killer” app that did not exist.  My take is for everyone to take a deep breath and consider the following:

• “Google” is so entrenched into our lives and lexicon that has gone from a noun to a verb.  Anything different will be strange - in the beginning.
• Sure, Cuil did not return the same results as Google.  Google has more than a decade of a head start, a suite of products that integrate seamlessly, and most of all, Google Analytics - something that shortens the mysterious way in which it finds and indexes sites.

As someone who remembers Northern Lights, Alta Vista and that funny start-up called “Google,” I think that we just need to wait.  I am not convinced that the Internet is NOT big enough to support more than one major search engine (and by this, I am exclusing directories like Yahoo!, which just annoy me anyway - take that, Carl Icahn).

So let’s all take a minute to Cuil off, let Cuiler heads prevail and wait and see what happens.

Mark