By Melissa Loovi
THOSE in the know will remember April 2, 1993, that Friday when Phillip Morris and Marlboro stunned the business world with a drastic 20 percent cut of the price of their premium brand, causing a pandemonium as all brands began to fluster under fears of a market catastrophe and “the death of cigarette brands”. ‘Marlboro Friday’ turned out, however, to be more of a wobble than a seismic shift and the other tobacco brands continued to command healthy (and often increasing) profit margins over a sustained timeframe.
In noticeably-similar fashion, the recent launch of search engine Cuil (pronounced “cool”) again raises some Marlboro-esque questions around the value of brands; only this time, the battle is being played out in the ultra-sophisticated Web 2.0 landscape.
The brains behind the “The world’s biggest search engine” are, ironically enough, three former Google search experts who hope to outdo their previous employer’s dominant search service. Coined after the Gaelic word for “wisdom”, Cuil is not be the catchiest name ever, but then neither was Google, once upon a time. Cuil claims to use far fewer servers than the search leader while indexing a much larger chunk of the Web. It also purports more relevant search results, because the results are based on organisation of ideas rather than link popularity. A final significant differentiator from Google is that Cuil doesn’t collect information on its users’ search histories or IP addresses. With today’s rising privacy concerns, this is a great selling point.
The Proof is in the Sambal
Of course, we had to try it out ourselves. At first glance, the site is a black, open space, even more minimalist than Google. There is no searching for images of the newest Proton, maps to that famous cendol shack in Malacca Town, or even the biblical truth from Malaysia’s dailies on Cuil, but for those simply looking for Web results, this might be a blessing. Proudly displayed is the number of pages Cuil has indexed—over 121 billion, which cofounder Anna Patterson claims is the most comprehensive index of any search engine and more than thrice the size of Google’s. But there’s a lot of ‘he says, she says’ going on; Cuil states it’s only 20 billion pages away from claiming the whole 141 billion bounty, yet a recent Google blog vouches that its engineers had noted a total Web page population of over 1 trillion, adding that their index was still the biggest—without actually stating a specific figure.
One obvious missing feature was spelling correction suggestions: Most modern search sites will suggest fixes for typos, but Cuil presents results for whatever is typed, even if misspelled. Not so good for those of us who are alphabetically-challenged, particularly if “Tahun Meliwat Malaysia” was accidentally typed in search of exciting tourism spots in our beautiful country.
The Nitty Gritty
Despite Cuil’s claims of the largest Web-page index, it displayed fewer total results than competitors. My search for direct marketing reported 5.7 million hits. Google found 28.7 million, Live Search showed 157 million, and Yahoo! claimed 290 million—a fixed pattern, in general. And where Google, Live, and Yahoo! list all of the results, Cuil limits what is visible, offering about 23 pages of results in total. But maybe the point is, how many results does one really need? Just a few very useful ones in most cases, and that’s what Cuil aims for.
The results layout is a definite change from what we’re used to. Cuil has either a two- or three-column display with tabs for result filters across the top and a Category box on the right offering related topics. Pleasantly, the results include more text than most current search engines provide—usually a full paragraph—and also related images. An interesting layout, but it may actually appear less readable to some, mostly because it’s not what we’re used to.
A major gripe is the filtering tabs: A search for direct marketing produced tabs for “Direct Marketing Association” and “ Direct Marketing Jobs”. More preferable would be tabs not just for results including the phrase direct marketing, but perhaps also phrases like “Marketing Basics.” The Category box was stranger still: It offered “Advertising Agencies” and “Spamming”, for some reason. No doubt these have links to direct marketing, but they aren’t the most relevant to the search at hand. What about “marketing” or even “Kurt Crocker”? Admittedly, this would probably require either human editors or some complex Web application. Still, it would be a great bonus if they could achieve that!
One of Cuil’s major claims to lure users away from the Big G is that it doesn’t collect browsing history and use it to present ads to surfers. As a pleasant consequence, one’s search history can’t be subpoenaed, either. In fact, Cuil drops only a couple of small cookies on a user’s system, rather than the many detailed cookies Google leaves.
Cyber Fodder
By all accounts on the blogosphere, Cuilmania will pass quickly and Google’s tremendous brand strength will give the search leader time to respond to its new competition if need be. So then maybe the question we should be asking is, what if Cuil did get two fat thumbs up from the online community, leaving the world’s strongest brand scrambling?
This ‘what if’ scenario sends out the following warning messages for all Malaysian marketers to consider:
- Brand loyalty loses a lot of value when switching between brands is an easy and low-risk consumer decision. Switching bank brands, car brands – even cigarette brands – represent much more risk and effort than switching search brands. On the Internet, people are more able (and more likely) to show loyalty towards a product rather than a brand.
- Incumbency, the cornerstone of hundreds of supermarket brands, also means far less on the Internet.
So, picture this: A new chocolate malt drink launches in Malaysia, promising to take on MILO. At launch, it achieves exactly the same distribution as MILO but has far less brand awareness because of its newness. Nevertheless, it manages to get the word out to a substantial amount of people (with almost no advertising). On Day One it achieves 5 million samples consumed, with many regions unable to keep up with such phenomenal demand.
This scenario would be impossible in a bricks-and-mortar brand world, but Cuil’s recent entrance onto the search scene has clearly proven that incumbency means peanuts in today’s Net-based world.
The point is clear: Having a seamless visionary thread that runs through marketing strategies gives companies a better chance of building the aforementioned reputation. Google talks about its vision as ‘managing all of the world’s information and making it universally accessible’. This filters all of its endeavours and helps to sharpen its reputation, keeping Google the distinctive leader of the pack. Despite having engaged in very little branding, Google still has the luxury of time to respond to competitive threats because it has done its groundwork so robustly for all this time.
So, in a USBshell
Seth Godin, author of best-selling marketing books and the most popular marketing blog in the world, indicates that there is still plenty of hope for companies that decode the new rules of an increasingly connected economy. He refers to an Internet-dominant scenario called ‘After Advertising’: after advertising, we’ve almost come in a full circle. But instead of products succeeding by slow, laborious word of mouth, the power of our new networks allows ideas to diffuse through segments of the population at lightning speed.
Godin concludes that brand equity buys the company time to respond to market threats and even borrow innovation from new competitors where it sees fit. This is what allows Google to add some ‘Cuilness’ to its product without losing too much traffic in the mean time. Let’s face it; at the end of the day, people would rather have Google plus some Cuil functionality than just plain Cuil.
So, while indexing more of the Web’s kajillion pages, delivering more relevant results, and improving presentation are great goals, the current version of Cuil is still less useful than the big three search engines, mostly because it lacks things like news, maps, image, and video searches. But it may be too soon to pass final judgement on a search alternative in its infancy. By all means, try out Cuil and do the obligatory search on your own name. But don’t remove Google from your ‘favourites’ list just yet.
Tom Costello, CEO and Founder
Tom’s breakthroughs in search architecture and relevance methods are at the core of Cuil’s technology. His research from his first days at Stanford has focused on establishing relevance by analysing text outside keywords on found pages. Tom’s pioneering work in search began in 1999 when he created Xift, a revolutionary search engine that introduced automatic clustering and page analysis. Tom later joined IBM where he developed the prototype of WebFountain. He was also a member of IBM’s strategy team for Storage Systems Strategy worldwide and drove the development of the company’s Homeland Security strategy. Tom has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and was on the Research faculty there until 2000.