Search Engine Optimization

Cuil

I was hesitant to put Cuil as the number 5, but after creating buzz as the Google killer (its not) I had to. Cuil, pronounced “cool”, launched in 2008 by ex Google employees. It claims to be larger than Google at 120 billion webpages, and uses that as their marketing tag line “The Worlds Biggest Search Engine”. Cuil also has a different appraoh to seach results. Instead of showing classic blue links it organizes results in 3 columns.

The start up was named as the one of the most successful and media called it the “Google Killer”, yet Wikipedia has some discouraging statistics:

According to Alexa, the site reached a peak of just over 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02% and ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic. By October 13, 2008, it had dropped to 0.005% and ranked as the 21,960th site in traffic.[15]

About Cuil | Your Privacy

Lycos

Lycos was started by Michael Loren Mauldin in 1995. By 1999 Lycos became one of the most visited destinations in the world, competing with AOL, MSN and Yahoo in portal features. In 2000 Lycos was sold to Telefonica for 5.4 billion dollars and in October 2004 Telefonica sold the company for only $95 million. Today Lycos is almost dead as a search competitor.

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