I wasn’t quite sure what was going on today when I saw mention of a new search engine, called Cuil (pronounced “cool”) on CNN. Apparently it was created by three ex-Google engineers.

Ooh, skandaal!

By all reports it was a complete and utter failure. TheStar.com had the following:

On Day 1 yesterday of its attempt to dethrone Google Inc. as king of the Internet search engines, Cuil was shaping up to be a New Coke-style fiasco.

Vitriol was flying fast on tech maven Chris Brogan’s IT blog. After waiting two hours for Cuil to return two results for his name, contributor Gopal Shenoy wrote: “(Cuil) is basically unusable – paint dries faster. Did they test this thing to see what the results are before they got coverage on CNN on how Google needs to be scared of them?”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is the latest in a long list of also-ran or failed challenges to Google, which displaced then-leader AltaVista soon after its 1998 launch by twentysomething Stanford University computer-science whizzes Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who became the world’s youngest billionaires when Google went public.

I searched for my name on Cuil and can confirm that is is completely useless. I mean, it didn’t even show the 2007 article entitled “Seth Rotherham is a Wanker,” which usually comes FIRST in Google’s search results for my name.

God, what a let down!