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So a group of ex-Google employees just blew millions of dollars trying to reinvent the wheel.

I speak, of course, of Cuil.com the much-hyped and much derided pretender to Google’s search engine crown.

Cuil, if you haven’t heard, was launched on July 28 as a supposed true competitor to Google’s supremacy.  Founders Tom Costello and Anna Patterson claimed that Cuil’s innovative search methods, plus its whopping index of 120 billion web pages, made it the next evolution in the internet search engine.

And with a reported $33 million in backing, the team could certainly afford a glitzy PR campaign, as evidenced by the hype in the mainstream media surrounding Cuil’s arrival. It was the kind of media coverage most fledgling websites could only dream of.

How ironic then, that a company whose entire success is thanks to Internet failed to anticipate the power of bloggers and tech geeks who were also eagerly anticipating the launch of the supposed next evolution in search engines.

Because when Cuil faced a series of major glitches in its first hours-it took over half an hour to return some searches and couldn’t find its own homepage-it was those same bloggers and tech geeks who gleefully set upon Cuil like a pack of starving wolves and savaged it as a joke, a failure and a technological disaster.

News of Cuil’s supposed epic failure spread from blog to blog like wildfire, and within a day, the same news media who had been salivating over Cuil had joined in branding it as an overhyped mess.

Surely a bunch of ex-Googlers would have known how quickly news spreads over the Internet, and prepared Cuil’s PR campaign accordingly. Instead, they seemed as wholly unprepared for word-of-mouth coverage as they were for Cuil’s launch.

When your main competitor’s very name is now an accepted euphemism for “search”,  you had better be ready to live up to your own hype.

Instead, it is unlikely Cuil will ever recover from the word-of-mouth tarring and feathering it received on its disastrous first day.

Categories: Industry Opinion, Social Media, Technology News