Not so cool runnings for Cuil

Yesterday's worldwide launch of Cuil, which is being heralded by its backers as the most comprehensive search engine on the net, did not get off to a smooth start.

The site temporarily crashed at one stage due to the volume of visitors and now many industry analysts and bloggers are critising the new 'semantic' search engine.

Cuil claims to have indexed 120 billion web pages, which it says is three times more than any other search engine.

Although Google has not responded to this claim, it did recently say that it knew of one trillion unique URLs on the web.

Part of Cuil's problem is its name, derived from an old Irish word meaning 'knowledge'.

"Cuil, by the way, isn't a great name. I think we can all agree. Hey, look, Google is a dumb name, too. But at least it's a thing," wrote Dave Burdick in The Huffington Post.

Other reviewers said that despite Cuil being a global search engine, its real focus is on the US.

"While I can see its relevance to the US market, it really failed to deliver on relevant local search. This of course was always going to be the case for a little backwater country like New Zealand," wrote Patrick MacFie in The New Zealand Herald.

"Anybody who thought Cuil was this Google-killer can really see now that no, that's not going to happen today — and the likelihood is that's not going to happen a year from now," said blogger Danny Sullivan editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.

So, for the time being, the field is still wide open for a real Google-killer, although it is too early to write off this particular challenger, especially as it does not store surfers' search data.

What do you think of the Cuil search engine? Have your say in the Web User forums.

www.cuil.com