The Hyping of Cuil

You might have noticed Cuil yesterday. You definitely did if you’re one of them internet enthusiasts, in the words of Topher Chris. In case you did not notice, Cuil is a “pioneering” new search engine, like Google, but bigger and better and with more sex. Read Web Write asks the question, in regards to all the Cuil hype,

I still don’t get it though - how come this startup got blanket coverage from tech news heavyweights, some of whom should know better than to buy into the hype? Did any of those publications actually test Cuil before writing up its greatness?

I wrote a fairly long, high minded, self-righteous post on how the answer to the above question is obviously no. This is a difference between bloggers and journalists, blah, blah, blah, suck my dick, and so forth. Suck my dick isn’t very high minded, depends on the company I suppose, but that was the gist of the now deleted post.

I decided before publishing the former post to (01) do a Google search and (02) use Cuil again. The Google search returned these headlines:

The New Cuil Search Engine Sucks - PC World
Cuil Stumbles out of the Gate - Also PC World
Why Cuil Is Not a Threat to Google - Time
Gallery: Cuil searches–hits and misses - ZDNet
How cool is Cuil? - asked the BBC, answer, not all that cool
Tepid response to rival search engine launched by ex-Googlers - Guardian
Search engine Cuil’s rocky debut - Toronto Star

Seems to me there was plenty of publications that did not buy into the hype. Of course, being one of them conspiracy type flakes, maybe Google was riggin’ the game. So, off to Cuil. Pictures worth a thousand words so…

Maybe there was hype, but any zombie with two fingers and a few spare seconds can see Cuil’s got some work to do. And while there’s major differences between journalists and bloggers, if you whittled them all away, you’d probably be left with a zombie, two fingers or ten, but a zombie, in evolutionary terms. The relative center being, like, Jesus or the Buddha or Stanley Kubrick, something like that.

July 29 2008 10:21:52 AM EDT