Chris Baskind dot com

How Cuil Is It to Misspell Your Brand Name?

28 July, 2008

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.

CuilEverybody 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:

Cool dot com

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.

{ 3 trackbacks }

David Temple according to Cuil » SEM Training & Certification
29 July, 2008 at 10:24 am
Gneistinn » Kjúl eða ekki
29 July, 2008 at 1:13 pm
MaximumCMO » Blog Archive » When Does Brand Naming Become UnCuil?: branding, creative branding, strategic branding, interactive marketing
8 August, 2008 at 11:38 pm

{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }

1 LPH 28 July, 2008 at 9:43 pm

I agree that the brand name is rather strange. I remember thinking the same when Google was announced as well as the processor name Celeron. Maybe they'll take your suggestion and go for cool.com -it is far easier to remember!

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2 rafalski 29 July, 2008 at 2:33 am

cùil also means a fly, or a bug in general

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3 Jenna 29 July, 2008 at 7:30 am

Interesting.. Sounds like a complete mess!

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4 Mig 29 July, 2008 at 7:38 am

Good points… I already misspell it… Ciul! I wonder if they considered asking a branding expert before releasing this…

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5 Adam_Y 29 July, 2008 at 7:58 am

I spend all day playing around with words at work, making them sound funny and look funny… but y'know, I didn't realise that it was supposed to be pronounced 'cool'… I had, 'see you ill', 'coo-ill' and a host of others…

I doubt this one is going to do very well, I've been terstingg it on sites I know, including my own and it's nowhere near as accurate as it should be.

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6 mediaguy 29 July, 2008 at 8:22 am

Interesting site, what about cuil-aid but that would probably upset the children that drink kool-aid,possibly brandable though

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7 Xander Becket 29 July, 2008 at 9:34 am

Yeah, at this initial stage when nobody is familiar with the company, getting over that initial Silicon-Valley weird naming problem can be pretty tough. And it's web design 101 to snatch up all the top-level domains for your website. That was retarded of them.

But, then again, nobody goes to googol.com, yahue.com, or mibo.com looking for those companies anymore.

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8 Katherine 29 July, 2008 at 9:57 am

I checked Cuil out when I saw the press on it, by running some searches I look for daily. They just weren't on there. I “cuiled” Katherine Peters, a fairly common name, and the server crashed. I really hope they get their act together, but they also brought it upon themselves. I'm sure they let the media know it was launching on Sunday, and they under-prepared for it. A little sad.

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9 Fuego999 29 July, 2008 at 11:19 am

I agree the name is plain stupid, and the search isn't even any good yet, i think all they have going for them is a big buzz just because they are “former google employees”.

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10 BC seo 29 July, 2008 at 11:23 am

The name is bad enough, but their results really stink.
And they display pictures beside links that aren't even from that site!

Their going now where from what I can see.

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11 Alex Schleber 29 July, 2008 at 6:57 pm

Excellent analysis, I came to a similar conclusion here:

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/cuil-knol-and-other-crimes-against-branding

But you have me beat on Gaelic research depth… :)

This launch and their branding has killed any normal hopes for them IMO, such that Scoble and others may be right in their assessment that the “launch” was really just a play to be bought out by MSFT for the search technology. They must have known that they weren't ready (e.g. the image mix-ups, etc.).

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12 Ryan 30 July, 2008 at 2:04 pm

With the images associated with the results for my name, I'm obviously not impressed by cuil thusfar:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laze/2711216544/

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13 andretannus 5 August, 2008 at 3:39 pm

not to mention the literall meaning of “cool”, which is COLD.

cuil.com is both dark, cornered and cold.

yet again, they forgot the number one single most important rule about branding a new international name: CHECK WHAT IS MEANS AND SOUNDS LIKE IN OTHER MAJOR LANGUAGES.

After Cantonese, english spanish and portuguese are quite widely spoken worldwide. I´m a native Portuguese speaker, and here “cool” sounds astoundingly like “CÚ”, (read coo in english), and is the ugliest most distorted and impolite way to refer to someone´s “anus”, and also means someone who is extremely incompetent and inconvenient.

Imagine someone asking someone else where they found something, to hear the person say something that sounds tremendously like “I found it up my asshole”, or maybe some girl telling her subordinate assistant to look for “whatever” in his ass!!!!!! AACKKKKKK!!!

I know “culo” is arse in spanish, and probably similar in any other latin derived language…

what the hell are these people thinking? Didn´t they get a freeking manual on how to pick names?

I can almost… no, I can DENIFETLY picture Mr. Costello sitting in his fat ass eating one of the already famous strawberry bowls an looking at Mrs. Patterson and deciding that they should name their new baby after daddy´s heritage, and americanly slamming the hammer without giving it another thought…

what a waste of 33 million dollars… what a waste…

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