This has to be one of the poorest naming/branding moves I’ve seen in a while. Cuil.com just launched, and apparently the term “cuil” is suppose to be pronounced “cool.” This big news is currently being covered on the homepage of CNN. My buddy Thunayan (who never sells his company’s domain names) already has a search engine on Cool.com. Seriously, what were they thinking? This doesn’t pass the radio/tv test.
Domain Hall of Shame: Cuil.com
I was thinking the same thing when I read about this on Yahoo this morning. If you have this great search technology why put yourself at such a disadvantage with a terrible name. I guess the VC’s that dish out millions to these guys just don’t see it as an issue, unbelievable.
They clearly couldn’t afford any branding expertise…….they only got $33MM in VC funding…….
They are a very bad bot. We had to write specific programs to stop them from stealing insane amounts of bandwidth from us. Did not obey robots.txt, and once we shut down seemed they just moved to use other IP ranges. This was about 4 months ago. This bot and Twiceler should definately be in anyone’s firewall for blocking!
60 seconds with ‘Cuil’ and I am seriously unimpressed. “Elliots blog” comes up in the number one spot, but no results at all for Elliot Silver. No results at all for several other queries that bring me just what I want from Google.
I read very recently that it’s not actually pronounced “cool”. I’m not exactly sure how it’s pronounced, but it’s apparently not “cool”. Awful search tool and name. These people are no longer Google employees for a reason! Unfortunately, they’re getting a lot of attention today from CNN, blogs like this, and other social news sites. It’s still publicity for them.
This is what happens when you live in an echo chamber. All your friends have companies with ludicrous names, so you think it’s fine when you come up with one too. I can just hear it: “Everyone thought Google was a dumb name at first too.”
This has got to be one of the worst. You can’t remember it, you can’t pronounce it, you can’t spell it, and you’re embarrassed to say it because you have to explain it and why it’s so lame.
This seems to be a trend….. Joost = Juiced?
There are many others that I am surprised at. I just can’t remember them.
JLC
Elliot,
Ditto here, I can’t believe this made the top news stories today !!
Make no mistake – the people are Cuil are heavyweights in the search business, and deserve a through review. But the name is terrible – I believe it could be a sinker. Search is competitive enough as it is, and a confusing name like this works against them.
Horrible name and I’ve been dissapointed with the search engine so far. Sounds like a $33m marketing campaign.
@Rob
Heavyweights? Right now, I get this message when I do a search:
“Sorry, an error occurred.
Please try your search again. If the problem persists, please be assured that our team is working quickly to resolve the issue.”
Hrm.
Yes – heavyweights. Louis Monier – go read about him in Batelle’s “The Search”, or Wikipedia. One loading error does not a bad engineer make.
Agree with Andrew’s comments about their BOT. It’s incredibly invasive and will index your server nonstop and make things very sluggish as a result. Imagine how much bandwidth they’ve cost companies from indexing 120 Billion pages.
I sent a C&D Complaint Letter to their company already.
More silly web2.0 domain trends. You would think with all that VC they could have bought a killer name. On a side not looks like your friends site cool.com is down? I can only wish for him its from to much traffic. That is a nice problem to have.
It looks like my response didn’t make it through yesterday.
@toomany – Yes – heavyweights. Louis Monier is a true Internet/search engine pioneer. Go read about him in John Batelle’s “The Search”, or look him up on Wikipedia.
Yeah I know what you mean. We were amazed that we didn’t here back from them about KUEL(.)COM — It’s still not the kuelest spelling, but it beats that. They probably spent the money on a printer instead. LOL
Really a bad choice. Cuil pronounced as cool? They must be kidding. Not in English, and not even in any language with more phonetic pronunciation (Spanish, Italian, neither in Slavic languages).
Estimates of fully native speakers of Irish range from 20,000 to 50,000 people!!! It should be compatible with a language that somebody speaks.
Foras na Gaeilge, the official governing body of the Irish language, doubted the assertion that ‘cuil’ means ‘knowledge’. “I am unaware myself of the meaning ‘knowledge’ being with the word ‘cuil’ in Irish,” Stiofán Ó Deoráin, an official on Foras na Gaeilge’s terminology committee, said.