The latest Google wannabe and new entrant to the Name Shame Hall of Fame, is “Cuil”. The company says that “Cuil” is pronounced “cool”. Really? We think whoever came up with this name is a tuil. As noted in a catty write up in Silicon Alley Insider, “We can’t pronounce it, we can’t spell it, and we don’t know how to use it in a sentence. Are we supposed to pronounce ‘Cuil’ like ‘cool,’ or the cutesey AOL-turned-MySpace-speak ‘kewl’? We’re already used to ‘googling it.’ Are we supposed to “cuil it” instead? We’ve seen commenters already misspell Cuil in writing about it, a serious problem when trying to bring people to a site. Especially if you don’t own common misspellings of your own domain: As CrunchGear notes, culi.com leads to an Italian porn outfit.”
To make things even more fuilish, the company website claims that “Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge”. We can’t find any old Irish word spelled “cuil”, however we did find “ciall” which is pronounced “keel” not “cool” and means what they think “Cuil” means.
Another story is that (Co-Founder Tom) Costello’s Irish heritage inspired Cuil’s odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic Folklore. Hmmmmmmmm.
A “Cuil” search finds this:
“Rumour has it that Northern Ireland’s own giant, Finn McCuill scooped up a huge clod of earth to fling at a fleeing rival, which stopped shot [sic] of its target and ended up in the sea. The clod of earth became the Isle of Man and the hole it left behind became Lough Neagh.”
We see the connection now….. wait, nope can’t see it (unless they are foretelling a metaphoric failure by throwing a clod of earth at rival Google and stopping short of the target).
Could be that they wanted to use “Ciall” (which is not a great name unless you are an Irish company) but it was already taken by these guys (who are an Irish company)?
It goes without saying, although we are saying it, that they broke all the ruils of the SMILE & SCRATCH Test.
They should have spent some of that venture money on a real cool name.
Just for kicks, we did a search on Cuil for “Eat My Words.” The results were bizarre… they got the photo right but WTF is the Eat My Words Poetry Zone?
