The search game got a little more interesting Monday with the launch of Cuil, the next Google wannabe. But it was a rough first day.

Everybody loves a giant killer, so there was no shortage of online ink today over the public debut of Cuil, a new engine which claims to search “more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.”

Cuil couldn’t fail to whistle up a tempest of launch coverage. Staffed by former Google employees with $33 million worth of investment capital at their backs, the secretive startup hinted at a new kind of search based on content, rather than link popularity (an oversimplification of Google’s methodology). All very exciting stuff.

Cuil’s big launch

The site’s rollout on Sunday night was met with hosannas from the Usual Suspects. Techcrunch, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, and many others did a great job of quickly sizing up how well Cuil lived up to its pre-launch hype, and the web buzz went into overdrive when Cuil’s servers folded like a bad poker hand within hours of launch. The site managed to struggle to its feet, and Cuil enjoyed widespread coverage in the mainstream media all day long.

Virtually everyone who wrote about Cuil today felt compelled to waste a sentence or two explaining the service’s oddball name. According to the company’s About page, Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. That’s not really true, but it goes nicely with the mystical stone circle photo on the website. We’ll roll with it.

There’s a fine line between clever and stupid

I’ve mucked about with brand names all my adult life, mostly in the form of radio station identities. One of my pet peeves is when a station insists on adopting an eccentric spelling of a common name. Unless you’re talking about breakfast cereal, for instance, there’s just no unspelling the word “kicks” in a person’s head. But the dial is littered with KIX and KIXX and KIKKS variants, all waiting to confuse an Arbitron survey participant and cheat a station out of the diary credit it deserves.

When presented with “Cuil,” someone who doesn’t speak Gaelic will pronounce it like “quill,” rather than some l33tspeak version of “cool.” Let’s suppose this user somehow manages to navigate to the site, likes it, and is telling a co-worker to try Cuil. Unless there’s a physical link or some tedious spelling involved, the co-worker will return to his or her cubicle and either call up the Quill office supplies website or this page:

That’s right: Cool.com — the way Cuil’s brand name is properly pronounced — is for sale. You’d think that if Cuil wanted to be known as “cool,” they’d have created a budget line item tagged No Brainer and written a check for whatever the owner of Cool.com wanted. Then they could have dispensed with the high concept Emerald Isle stuff and offered people a Cooler Way to Search.

What a mess

Think this isn’t a problem? Take a look at this screen grab of popular Google searches today and look at all the variants of Cuil.

It gets a little worse. Cuil locked down the .net version of their URL, but not the .org. Cuil.eu is a spammy page covered with Google search boxes. And — as Crunchgear’s Nicholas Deleon discovered earlier today — should you happen to mistype Cuil as “Culi” in your browser, you’ll be greeted by an entirely NSFW Italian porn site.

Cuil debuted a beautiful site with some fresh thinking about the way search can be done and presented to the user. Their privacy policies are enlightened, and there’s plenty of available goodwill for anyone who wants to give Google a run for their money. But Cuil has a big job ahead of them — not the least of which involves their branding.

Cornered

So what does cuil mean, anyway? The original version of the company’s name was spelled Cuill, invoking the ancient folklore character Finn McCuill and a mythological hazel tree associated with knowledge. But is a different word altogether, meaning a corner or recess.

If one were of a superstitious bent, naming a new company after something dark and hidden might be considered a poor omen.

Tagged as: Branding, Cuil, Google, Search