Performance is...well, laughable - http://is.gd/16yX - Stephen Pierzchala

yeah you can tell why these guys aren't at google anymore - Chris Harris

Their system setups is interesting. How they index only Sports data on select databases and so on. Also why do they display results in 2/3 columns? It's so hard to follow that - Bartek Ciszkowski

What amazes me is that we, bloggers, started to hype the search engine based on what the company was willing to share - without even taking it a test run. And now many will have to admit they were too positive when it was not deserved. - Svetlana Gladkova from twhirl

for real - Sarah Perez

Svetlana: all it took is for me to do a single search on it for me to see that it just wasn't going to stand up to a deep analysis. I'm very glad I am getting off of the PR treadmill of "keep up with Mashable and Techcrunch and write about everything based on press releases." Why is this on CNN and NPR already? They have a good PR team, that's why. Played! - Robert Scoble

Not ready for prime time. Great press kills a bad product faster. Apologies to Bill Bernbach. - Dave Martin

In this day and age, is there really room for a new search engine? I'm all for innovation but the likelihood of someone making a sizeable dent in Google's market share or even challenging Live Search is quite low, no? - Dave Stevens

Lesson: Don't go for big press until you're ready. One of my VC friends advises people only to go for ~5,000 users in the beginning (so many beginners want traffic, traffic, traffic). Then you can test your product, change the interface, etc... before you get into a "New Coke" and "old Coke" situation. 5,000 is enough to give your product/website a good testing, and avoids this Cuil failure. - Mitchell Tsai

trying searching Cuil for itself. http://www.cuil.com/search... :) - Jeff (Team マクダジ )

I'm unimpressed by Cuil. It's not how big their index is, it's about how accurate their results are. From my early experiments, I don't get what I'm searching for -- isn't that what a search engine is supposed to do? - wrecks

I also think that it is early for Cuil to launch, but it is good that some people are trying to create alternatives to Google’s tyranny in search. Without any competition in their core business, Google will eventually become the next Microsoft - Kerem Ozkan

mmmm... I wonder why so much hype around of _utility_ ? search has been utility for years, yet everyone and his dog into PR for yet-another-search... was it GOOG price on IPO which makes you blind repeaters? try to remember how many startups you've seen recently in major continent-wide utility business, like electricity or water supply? yes, none... oh, yeah, law & rules are not written for bloggers... they can even refuse math and other natural science ;) - A. T.

Not impressed. While the layout for results is pretty, it doesn't give me any information. Ran a search on my own site - Dad info - and it got the bloody thumbnail wrong :( Dig a little deeper on a search where you know the net landscape well (eg vanity search) and the results are often bizarre - the photos acommpanying the SERPS are irrelevant/random/wierd. Can't help thinking that the next generation of search will be people centric rather than page centric - I can find more interesting stuff on FF. - Tom Beardshaw

i saw an insert on BBC news today on this, went over to do vanity search just to test, back came some old articles of comments i left last year on tech blogs, now it's unavailable, plus the dark background is awful ;( FAIL! - Mario Olckers

I got 2 searches in last night - disappointed with results - and then it crashed and 'went down for maintenance' - yeah, not overwhelmingly impressed. - Lucretia Pruitt

Harsh but somewhat fair criticism. That said no service has ever been perfect when rushed *glares at twitter* - Mo Kargas

may be - accexine

Despite other criticism: I like the relaxed feel of the 3-column presentation in Cuil. Cuil, Viewzi, and identi.ca have relaxing and comforting front pages (nice color scheme). - Mitchell Tsai

@Mitchell - There's something wrong if the best thing 'bout a website is the color scheme - Yuvi

@Robert: They obviously have a great PR team - making everyone repeat their claims of how great the product is. And I am glad I have decided to wait until it is live and do a search before hyping it myself - I would have felt it was unfair to our readers otherwise. - Svetlana Gladkova from twhirl

Svetlana: This is what happens when the marketing dept moves faster than the tech dept. Often it's the reverse. Hard to coordinate the two. - Mitchell Tsai

Mitchell: True but I feel it is not really lack of coordination and instead it is a deliberate move to get all the positive coverage they can and hope no one will see the problems. After all, as a marketing person myself I don't think they are unable to notice the irrelevant results themselves. - Svetlana Gladkova from twhirl

Svetlana: Since the "glamor self-search" results work well for university professors and some famous people, I think it's a miscalculation from having too small a test group (since they've been concerned with a stealth launch). They probably didn't test enough middle-level people (e.g. me with only 47,000 pages on Google) to see the problems. - Mitchell Tsai

Rather than a stealth launch, It seems that in this case a better process would have been (1) alpha-launch, generate buzz by selectively letting in tech bloggers, test their stuff, make bloggers feel good by being in on something early, about 200-500 people (2) private beta-launch, quiet, limited to 5,000 people (3) New York Times launch. - I think their team was too cocky (e.g. we're smarter), not realizing they would shoot themselves in the foot. - Mitchell Tsai

I went to work this afternoon to get away from the Crewl Cuil conversation. What were the teachers talking about ? Cuil. *sigh* - LPH™ and his dog P™

Mitchell: Very true, when I read they decided they were ready for everyone on day 1 and decided not to add beta to the logo, I was very excited - finally someone dares to launch a working product from the beginning. And after actually trying it out I could not understand why they chose not to go with private beta the way you describe. It could have potential but it definitely is not ready for prime time yet. - Svetlana Gladkova from twhirl