Cuil stumbles out of the gate

Cuil, the latest search engine startup to come out swinging from its corner with the hope of knocking out Google, is instead taking a beating that could do it long-term damage as a credible contender.

The company received broad media coverage on Monday, primarily because it has former Google engineers on its team and because of its claim to have the world's largest search index, but Cuil is now facing an angry backlash.

The site has had performance and availability problems throughout the day, and a growing chorus of search market observers has declared the engine's results to its queries unimpressive.

In addition, the site has launched with only a Web search engine, at a time when it's considered a basic requirement for any search engine with aspirations of competing against Google to have at least some basic vertical search tabs for news articles, photos, maps and local business information.

Without the ability to collate general search results with photos, news articles, the increasingly popular video files and mapping information, a search engine is effectively unable to provide the type of "universal" search results that have become de riguer and that Google now consistently does.

In short, what looked like a successfully architected public-relations launch is backfiring because the product has failed to meet the lofty expectations that were created.

Backed by reputable investors that have reportedly invested $33 million in it, Cuil will now have to go into damage control instead of riding the early momentum, and hope that end-users and industry observers will give it another chance once it works out its kinks.

"First impressions count a lot," said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, who on Monday morning was unable to give Cuil a thorough test because of the site's performance problems.

While Cuil could become an interesting alternative to Google and the other major search engines, that will take some time. In hindsight, it might have been wiser for Cuil's management to launch the site more quietly and give themselves time to improve it, Sterling said.

Instead, by making a big, noisy media splash, they gave themselves little room for error. "This much media coverage creates high expectations," he said.

Indeed, Cuil came out with an in-your-face attitude, claiming to have the largest Web index of any search engine: 120 billion Web pages, which Cuil states is "three times more than any other search engine." It was a point that its officials made in interviews with media outlets prior to Monday's debut.

But the site seemed unable to handle some softball, straight-forward queries. For example, a search for "barack obama" returned on the first page of results mostly links to different pages of Obama's official site, hardly useful if one is looking for a variety of sites on the presidential candidate. A search for "St. Louis, MO" initially returned zero results.

Among others, search engine expert Danny Sullivan criticized Cuil for focusing on the size of its index -- a practice that fell into disfavor years ago, as engines focused on the quality of results -- and questioned the basic validity of the claim.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.