The name probably caused them more trouble than it should have. It's the same criticism being thrown at Bing (the idea that Google is a verb now, and you need a name that works well for that).
I can't just tell my friends "hey, try out Cuil", I have to spend a few seconds explaining how to spell it. That's no way to get the word out.
The technology is good, the site is very fast and relevant. But there's a lot in a name.
When 'CUIL' first came out their crawler was all over my servers, sometimes to the point of making them inaccessible for users, I remember having a devil of a time getting rid of them because they came from lots of different IP blocks.
Apparently their bot is called twiceler, maybe they should name it 'CuilBot' or something to that effect.
Judging by your response, maybe they shouldn't name it Cuilbot.
I wonder if their overzealous bots and subsequent blocking are reasons why they launched with such terrible results. I heard several reasons for that catastrophic failure:
* Overstressed subject-specific servers failed, leading to
porn on hamburger searches and that kind of thing
* Crashing, random result variations due to overload
* Excessive media hype exacerbated the load issues
I can't just tell my friends "hey, try out Cuil", I have to spend a few seconds explaining how to spell it. That's no way to get the word out.
The technology is good, the site is very fast and relevant. But there's a lot in a name.