An old PR quote states that any publicity is good publicity. The idea is that no news is a fate worse than bad news when it comes to promoting a product. It's this school of thought that made sex tapes and stints in rehab de rigeur for any D list celebrity looking to move into A list territory. An opposing adage states, nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. Essentially meaning too much attention on your product can set unrealistic expectations. Take the 1998 remake of Godzilla which was overhyped and fell flat on its face at the box office. So which of these two philosophies will apply to the latest entry in the competitive search engine field, newcomer Cuil which launched on July 28?


Cuil is pronounced "cool" and supposedly means knowledge in Gaelic but I think it sounds a little too much like a rather rude French word. Even though it was barely out the gate it was already generating significant buzz in both print and online media, with coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Business week as well as the usual tech forums like Mashable and PC Magazine. This is partly because the company unleashed a publicity blitzkrieg but also because of its pedigree. Three of its founders were formally with Google including Anna Patterson and Russel Power who were the brains behind Google's TerraGoogle search index along with the re-designer of eBay's search and the CTO of both AltaVista and BabelFish. If you are looking to build a massive industrial strength search engine this is the equivalent of a dream team. Put these minds together in one room and you can be sure something amazing will emerge.

So naturally their latest endeavor was saddled with the dubious honor of being named a "Google Killer". I say dubious because the title comes with some pretty high expectations. Can any search really challenge Google's virtual monopoly? It is no small feat to go up against a company that has become so synonymous with online search it's now used as a verb, as in "I Googled him". The Infobahn is littered with the corpses of those who came, saw and failed to conquer. They include Mahalo, Gigaweb, Hackia, Exalead and Powerset which was gobbled up recently by Microsoft. Even the established veterans who've spent billions in the attempt like Yahoo which has 21% market share and Microsoft which has 8.5% grudgingly admit to the difficulty in making any dent in Google's 62% market share. But history is not deterring the Cuil team who are setting themselves up as a David to Google's Goliath, a move that will have tech journalists everywhere rubbing their hands in glee. People love to root for the underdog. Take the case of Avis vs. Hertz. In the early 60's Hertz was the dominant name in car rentals with Avis far behind. Avis had the brilliant idea to use their runner up position as an advantage, boasting that "We try harder" and effectively repositioning Hertz's market dominance as a weakness. The results…before the campaign Avis had just 11% of the US market; within a year of the ads they had 35%. But this is only a viable strategy if people don't like the guy playing the part of the giant. And aside from some privacy and size concerns most people have a positive view of Google.

Casting yourself as the little guy does not work if you are going to simultaneously brag about having the biggest you know what. Cuil launched with a pretty big claim, it indexed more pages than any other search, 120 billion web pages to be exact, which they say is 3 times that of Google. Google stopped publicly stating its numbers 3 years ago (when it had 8.3 billion pages) but it did issue a preemptive blog post about its growing search operations. Cuil is keeping hush-hush about the algorithms that enable it to search more pages with fewer computers at allegedly a 10th of the cost of Google who spend about 1 billion annually on the backend infrastructure of their search. So here again is the age old question, does size really matter or is the way you use it more important? Google delivers more relevant ads and has more advertisers in their system than any of their rivals. Their paid search business accounted for 40% of all online search dollars in 2007. Even rival Yahoo, after spurning Microsoft's unwanted takeover proposal, hopped into bed with Google to run Google's superior search advertising technology on Yahoo sites next to its own search results.

Cuil currently offers no ads on its pages and claims it won't use IP addresses or cookies to monitor a user's search or surfing habits in order to target advertising like others do. That will win them points among privacy watchdog groups but it is not very practical business wise. You see one of the biggest advantages Google has over their competitors is that they can provide better search results because of the sheer size of their advertising platform. Unless Cuil can develop an ad platform to rival Google's, it will face an uphill battle trying to compete with the leader. Google's control of the market forces every website to conform to their way of doing things so as to have a more favorable position on Google. To beat Google you have to either be Google or else offer a totally new kind of technology and platform that will make theirs seem antiquated.

I'll admit Cuil definitely "looks" cooler. From the homepage with its midnight black, muted blue grays and no links for email, groups etc, it is even more minimalistic than Google. And the difference is also apparent in the way it displays results. Rather than the long list we have come to expect, you get a magazine style layout with longer snippets of text and often thumbnails all of which are organized into two or three columns. The right hand side is dedicated to related categories to assist you in narrowing down your search and this can come in handy sometimes especially during research. Cuil says that its technology delves into the actual content of a page and pattern analysis figuring out how words are related unlike the Google approach which catalogs the number of keywords and ranks results based on the number of links there are to a site. The relevance of the results is highly subjective so it is hard to say which method is better in that aspect.

Though Cuil is mainly American English they have plans to add support for major European languages soon. But right now the company has its hands full putting out fires like traffic related crashes and complaints about incomplete, weird, irrelevant, or mismatched results. Because Cuil is an alternative to traditional search engines they say results should not be expected to be the same. Their search machines are specialized to a particular field, ones that index entertainment, ones that index sports and others that understand health and so on. But if they get over loaded they drop offline and this leads to inconsistent or irrelevant results from the ones left that are online. I'll give them that but it still doesn't explain why there are no Wikipedia related results even for history related searches.

Soon after its debut the reviews stated pouring in and they ranged from unfavorable to lukewarm though this may have less to do with the technological merits and more to do with bloggers and journalists indulging that great American tradition of bursting someone's bubble since Cuil execs have been less than modest in their claims to the media. The site has only been live a few days and with the birth of any new project there are bound to be growing pains. I do not want to seem unfair so I may revisit this once they've had time to get their act together. All eyes are on Cuil so it does not have the luxury of getting its footing slowly or quietly. However with a war chest of US$33 million from venture capital investors they can purchase all the programmers from Silicon Valley to Bangalore, pump them full of Diet Coke and put them to work around the clock ironing out all the kinks. Whether the intense media scrutiny becomes a boost for Cuil or hastens the company's demise before they have a chance to improve has yet to be determined. But since I have to render a verdict on what I have seen so far I will rely on complicated scientific statistical methodology. Actually I just did a vanity search on both engines. Typing Lexink on Google brought up the Lexink homepage as the first listed match…naturally. I then ran the same search on Cuil and found the first hit was someone's Gaia Anime avatar (huh?) while the Lexink homepage came up halfway in the second page of results. That's not very Cuil.