So, this launched to a whole lot of fanfare, but the general response has been lukewarm, to say the least. I dunno – I have to say that when I played with it, it actually seemed to be ok, and I liked the magazine-style layout, but that’s definitely not the experience of a lot of peeps out there. One thing I did find was that the picture selection seemed pretty weird – looks like it doesn’t take pics form the site it references, but rather from an image search on the same terms (I’m guessing here)?

Regardless of whether the service itself actually works, or the “mine’s bigger than yours” attitudes in terms of unique URLs searched vs google something I will say is that THE NAME SUCKS!

Horrible, just horrible. I can’t imagine anyone that feels its not. Cuil – pronounced ‘cool’ – just the fact that they had to spell this out in the press release is nasty.

And checking the blogsphere, it seems that pretty much every one else is in agreement. This comment in particular caught my eye (from Metafilter):

“…Cuil is a really dumb name. It sounds like the name of a thief that’s hanging out with Conan in some of the older Windsor-Smith/Thomas-era comics. Cuil is a spunky teen who clawed his way up out of poverty in Stygia before fleeing to Zamora where he joins up with Conan. At first he treats Conan like a mentor, but ultimately attempts to betray the barbarian after being tempted by some Aquilonian lords. Of course, said lords turn on Cuil at the last moment and the youth sees the error of his ways. He dies saving Conan from the very trap he helped set. All of this would happen in the space of a single issue and we’d never hear about it again. That’s because the name ‘Cuil’ says ‘filler’ to me and nobody wants that…” - robocop is bleeding

Made me go back and revisit this blog article too, on the 10 worst web2.0 names…