Cuil Interest Shows Hunger For Search Competitor

Cuil, the search engine launched at the beginning of the week with brassy fanfare and 50 million searches conducted the first day of launch. "[T]hat’s in the same ballpark as Microsoft’s Live Search and approaching Yahoo!. And they have a bit more infrastructure than our small start-up," the Cuil team blogs. The traffic "outstripped" their ability to respond, causing some machines to fail, and, as we know, the masses to be underwhelmed.

Sarah Carey, Cuil's communication strategist and columnist for Ireland's Sunday Times, blogged this morning she sent word to no more than 20 journalists.

Sounds like they sent them to the right journalists who were able to recognize the Stanford/Palo Alto/PhD/former Googler search brains behind what was effectively touted as the world's biggest search engine, and the fever just spread from there. Google's post about scanning Yahoo's cache. This section is an eyebrow raiser:

Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area.

The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves.

When I observed this behaviour first I was appalled and took my CEO friend aside. This was disastrous! His company would never succeed if he wasted money like this and didn’t crack the whip. He laughed. This is the way it works out here. 

Well, they say you should dress for the job you want and not the job you have. If a company wants to be the Googleplex, one might suppose they should start acting like it.