Despite its supposed pronunciation, the one thing Cuil definitely isn’t, is cool. After the tremendous splash the newly released search engine made on Monday following spectacular media coverage its rating in the online community has dropped to absolute rock bottom. It was heralded as a true ‘Google killer’ and indeed is run by several former Google employees, however, there can be no doubt that Sergey and Larry can sleep soundly in their multi-coloured ball covered beds for quite a while longer.

Billing itself as “the world’s biggest search engine”, Cuil promised to bring a viable alternative to Google, both in terms of how it presented and indexed results and how it protected your privacy. While we cannot yet dispute its claims about privacy, there is no doubt that it has failed to present any kind of alternative to the more conventional, as it would call them, search engines already in place.

One way of looking at it is to say that Cuil’s Monday launch and their subsequent ‘whale tail’ scenario started off rather well for them. We all know how media outlets love to push news of any challenge to Google’s dominance, and also that we as consumers lap them up- this was exactly what happened for Cuil. Scores of users were driven to the search engine resulting in a similar message across the board: “Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.”- a tantalizing message, serving only to drive even more visitors. Unfortunately for Cuil, they added that ‘more capacity’ in just a few hours and the general public got their chance to size up the search engine. This led to the now universal consensus that, while Cuil may look slightly nicer than some of its competitors, its results are in many cases utterly irrelevant and completely jumbled in its ‘magazine style’ results window.

For example, a search on Cuil for ‘Cuil’ itself yielded results for French breads and Irish cottages- not a whiff of the search engine or, incidentally, any of the bad press it’s been getting. Furthermore, not only does Cuil bestow the reader with irrelevant results, it accompanies these with equally irrelevant images from completely different web pages, take a search for ‘MobileMe’ for instance. The first result actually linking to a page from Apple was alongside this bizarre image of some kind of archaic filing system, sat on what looks to be blue, crushed velvet.

For now, and for the foreseeable future, Cuil will remain a ridiculed and outcast search engine, bettered on almost every front by either Google or other, new and emerging search engines, such as SearchMe. It can be assumed that Cuil will at some point try to branch out into other areas, perhaps attempting to rival Google’s dominance of online mapping, however, it seems some internet users are already predicting dire results for such a venture.