Cuil down period

When your brand is the de facto term for the product or service you're selling, it's gotta be darn near impossible for competitors to dent the market. I'd guess that even more so than Kleenex or Coke, Google has become the term for its product. Has anyone in the last 10 years said they'd "conduct an online search"?

That's why I was interested to read about Cuil (pronounced "cool," apparently), a new search engine designed to compete with Google. Story is that it was launched by a husband-and-wife team who fled Google. Guess they're not going to the alumni reunion this year, huh?

Although the Times tech guy didn't like it much, I think the search results look kinda cool and organized, and when I Cuiled myself (less gross than Googling oneself?) it did better than Google at finding stuff I've written recently and posting it higher in the list.

But if you're launching a search engine that is supposed to compete with Google, you'd, uh, better make sure that on the day your p.r. hits the papers, this doesn't happen:

What are the odds Google employees created a program to crash Cuil's servers? Nah.