See It LIVE!! The Cuil Social Media/Online Rep Management Show!

Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 28 of July , 2008 at 10:23 am

I would have posted about the new Cuil search engine hours ago, only I was too busy reading all of the tech junkies’ posts on how their first searches went. I alternated between hopeful looks, shaking my head, and laughing out load.

So what’s the scoop on Cuil, the new search engine created by Google alums? In their own words:

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too. Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.

That sounds, well, cool. Content and relevance are amazingly wonderful things for advertisers wanting to build their business without having to win the page rank competition first. What I really wanted to look at was the Cuil advertising, and see how it is working for them.

What are the effects of Social Media and Online Reputation Management on Cuil’s product brand? First off, the Social Media aspect:

1. Their kick-off got a lot of buzz by both national news media like CNN, MSNBC and NY Times, prompting a lot of look-sees blogs, and vlogs about Cuil.
2. Hundreds of Tech sites from Slashdot to Cnet to Techcrunch jumped on board to look at what could be a promising Google Contender and then posted their results in a Social Media extravaganza.

Honestly, a company couldn’t pay for advertising like this. Not only national online media and news outlets, but hundreds of social media and technial forums were reviwing and discussing their product too. But wait…

The amazing thing about Social media is that it will put your brand/product out there for all to see and talk about, warts and all.

There are definitely a lot of bugs. For example, the first page of a search for “Cambridge University” fails to link to the University of Cambridge’s official site, but “University of Cambridge” has it as the first hit

1. The forums are lit up with users say that their search returned pages and articles not updated since 1998, out dated material to say the least.
2. Users report that the pictures returned often have nothing to do with the site or description.
3. Users report that the site has been down numerous times due to high traffic levels.

Let’s see what kind of Online Reputation management Cuil has, and how they will manage what is looking like a difficult launch.

                      Category: Online Reputation Management, Social Media                      

No comments yet.