This Time it’s Personal: It’s You (is it really?)

Oct 25th

Posted by Lolly in Advertising and Communication

4 comments

Does anyone understand the meaning Yahoo!’s latest advertising campaign ‘This Time it’s Personal: It’s You!’?

After a little Googling (ooo the irony!), I found out that this campaign is in fact supporting Yahoo!’s new search format which now features a new left column that allows users to filter results, but also to include notes in their Search Pad (does anyone know what a search pad is? I didn’t…)

Will people understand the meaning of this campaign? Unlikely.

, , ,

Cuil review from a linguistic point of view…

Jul 28th

Posted by Lolly in Branding & Packaging

19 comments

 

I picked up a thread by Mashable on Twitter this morning talking about the new search engine Cuil, packed with ex-Googlers in their team. Cuil claim to be the world’s biggest search engine, with an index of 120 billion websites in the world. Rather than relying on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. The odd name Cuil is an Irish word for knowledge. 

Well dear Cuillers (cuillère in French means spoon), I have something to tell you… If you’re claiming to be the largest search engine in the world, you should think global and act local. And here I am talking about your brand name. Cuil sounds like ‘couilles’ (balls/bollocks) or cul (arse) in French! Not exactly enticing…

Despite such poor branding taste, I decided it was time to check out Cuil in more depth but sadly got the following message:

Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.

Thanks for your patience.

When I did finally manage to take a look at their homepage, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the search results, although graphically speaking the site does look good and categorises information in an interesting way.

 

I have just done a quick Twitter search and the feedback so far isn’t particularly positive.

 

I am not quite sure how they’ll overcome so much bad publicity on their launch date but everyone is talking about them at the end of the day! 

So what do you think of Cuil? Am I being to harsh? Fire your comments away!

, , , , ,