The Cuil Debacle: not so cuil.

by Nicolas Noben

cuil is funny Take an unknown japanese company and suppose it comes on the market with a product that is supposed to kill the ipod. The press is all over it, Digg’s homepage screams “the Ipod killer is here” and your fingers become numb.

They’ve thrown millions at it, the blogoshpere is buzzing, even Michael Arrignton wants to publish it the minute it’s live. On top, you add the words such as stealth startup, known investors, ex-sony employees and the word secret.

The result, a less than working player, which tends to skip tracks in a playlist, mixes up metadata and looks radically different than the ipod, yet based on the same exact idea. It’s black instead of white.

That’s cuil. Except it doesn’t play music, it searches the web.

It’s quite a debacle and it’s indeed all over the web. Searching for “Bill Clinton” returns his biography but a photo of another politician, “Boris Becker” returns the photo of Andre Agassi and finally looking up “Missionary” returns the right definition but not quite the right picture!

Let’s look at the bright side. You don’t have to fiddle with your browser settings, you’re not even tempted to give it a go and they won’t complain about scaling issues like Twitter has.

So let’s look at the facts and let me present to you: