Cuil Launches With a Thud

Somehow we think Cuil, the latest challenger to Google Search, expected more from their debut. BusinessWeek reports that Cuil launched Monday to what it refers to (diplomatically) as a “cool reception.”

Basically, the search engine works—sort of. Many users reported trouble even accessing it, receiving amusing errors such as “Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now,” which spawned doubts about the company’s long-term ability to resolve outages.

Plus, the search results themselves were a little off; if you searched for “Cuil” or “Cuil search engine itself,” you’d get nothing from Cuil.com. Another famous pundit noted that if you searched Sergey Brin (the founder of Google) you’d get 250 matches, whereas if you searched random Cuil employees, you’d get results numbering in tens of thousands. A little hand-tweaking of search results, anyone?

In short, without accurate search results, without rock-solid reliability, and without mobile components of any kind, Cuil is off to a rough start.

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