Do you remember last year, when a startup named Cuil that was founded by two ex-Googlers made huge noise when it launched its search engine with the claim of having the largest search index in the world?

The result was a huge initial traffic spike. But when it didn't "beat Google," its traffic dropped like a whale being thrown out of an airplane.

While Cuil has been quiet - a non-story - for months, it has now suddenly reemerged with an array of new features based on bringing real-time news and search results. Did Cuil just launch its own competitor to Twitter Search and Facebook Search?

It's Nifty, But...

This feature is very simple, honestly. If you search keywords that are generating real-time results (i.e. Hurricane Bill, Obama), you will see a new bar on the right hand side with "# Realtime Results" indicating just exactly how many realtime results Cuil has found.

When you click on the bar, this is the popup you get:







The three features are (1) that you can scroll through real-time results, from blogs and news sources (2) that you can see the "hotness" of the real-time result, and (3) you can drag and drop the bar onto your desktop to monitor news about that subject at anytime.

Okay, so is this a competitor to Twitter Search? Maybe a little, but really it's more like OneRiot in terms of real-time search. And to be honest, OneRiot blows Cuil out of the water in this vertical.

While features like these are good additions, they still don't make it a better search engine than Google or place it above the usefulness of Twitter Search. Cuil's losing more traffic every month, and the launch of Bing cannot help any either. Real-time is a nice feature, but it doesn't do anything that isn't already on the market.





