Conservative Rumblings

I know, weak pun. After watching President Bush sign in a socialist-style bailout of a bunch of crooked mortgage companies, I’m not feeling very inspired.

I’m going to admit it. I took the hype. Cuil sounded really, really, well, cool, and I wanted to see someone belly up to the bar and throw back a couple of shots with Google without passing out immediately like every other challenger has.

Now Cuil, which was billed in one of the largest media buildups in the history of search engines as a potential adversary of Google, is failing miserably.

Now, to be fair, I understand that this is a new technology and bound to have flaws. But the company brought this on themselves. They strutted around, bragging about everything their engine could do, and they built up an absolutely and impossibly huge expectation. If they had not created such anticipation, they would not have been in as much trouble as it has brought them. Basically, they needed to put their money where their mouth was, and we found out that their money, ala “Kingpin,” was a twenty wrapped around Monopoly money.

I blogged on Monday about the engine, saying that it had promise and that the talent behind it meant that at least they would not embarrass themselves. Unfortunately, they have.

Two days after “launch” and the engine is still completely unusable. The results make no sense; I searched, again, for “ian essling” (with no quotes). It told me I had over 1700 results, but then would only show me two pages worth of results, all of them save one utterly irrelevant.

Cuil was not ready to be unveiled. Never should a piece of software, whether it is an operating system (Vista), a search engine or even a game (everything ever made by EA) be released to the public before it actually works properly.

You would think this is common sense. But no, apparently it is not anymore. Cuil is an embarrassment. It could have been something. Instead, it may be a footnote. Even if it eventually gets online and starts to work the way it was promised to do, many people will never even give it a second chance.

Cuil’s people need to fix it and fix it quick, and then start the long and arduous climb up the “regaining brand integrity” mountain. Good luck with that.