The Googlization of Everything

MarketWatch:

Five reasons Cuil won't kill Google...yet
Commentary: Search challenger faces huge odds
By MarketWatch
Last update: 10:12 a.m. EDT July 28, 2008
LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Privacy advocates and proponents of greater competition will be relieved to know a rival to Google's search engine has finally appeared.
Cuil, pronounced "cool," debuted Monday, promoting itself as offering searches of three times as many web pages as Google and 10 times as many as Microsoft.
The company says "With Cuil, your search history is always private." It argues that it will analyze the web, rather than the people searching it. Ouch! Take that, you Google people!
The Cuil search paradigms were developed by a husband and wife team: Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, former search architect at Google (GOOG) , along with a slew of additional former Google employees.
The site certainly proved popular in the early going, offering periodic error messages, but also quick results when it did work.
But in spite of an apparently ravenous demand for alternatives to Google, any challenger faces daunting obstacles that include the following:

1.
Google got there first, and is friendly enough to consumers to keep them coming back with free email, free photo sharing, free web applications and so forth.
2.
First impressions matter a lot and while Cuil's search results may be better, more complete, or even more aesthetically pleasing, the fact that the site is stumbling in its first day out will leave a lot of potential users unimpressed.
3.
Analyzing searchers may not be popular with the public, but it's insanely popular with advertisers who, after all, are search engines' real customers.
4.
It's unlikely that making search results better, even a lot better, will be enough by itself to capture the attention of users. The Google toolbar is already well established on tens of millions of search browsers.
5.
However dubious Google's privacy protections may be, it has yet to prove evil enough to topple Microsoft in the annals of technological villainy.

Still, if anything will act to curb or break the Google dominance on the web, it will better, faster, cheaper technology. Cuil's got the breeding, but whether it has the strength to go the distance remains to be seen.
- Tom Bemis, assistant managing editor