Unless the blog author builds software that never crashes -- even when it get millions of hits on its first day, then he should cut them some slack. I'll put money on the fact that Google didn't have the same kind of traffic on their first day that Cuil did. And Google has had 10 years to get it write. Yet he expects perfection on the first day.
The blog author was one of the founders of Lycos (read: search engine long before Google) and was pretty involved in keeping it alive under stress (albeit 1990s stress, not 2000s stress).
That's because Google lived in an era where there weren't a bunch of asshole flunkies writing about tech startups. They created a product that spread via word-of-mouth, not through press releases. People that used Google liked it, and it spread.
If you launch under the pretense of being a possible Google killer - and the people making this certainly did nothing to stifle that outrageous claim - then you need to expect a ton of flack when something goes wrong. And things went wrong.
I don't think it is as much of a matter of writing software that never crashes, but rather a matter of protecting your site from crashing on the launch.
I'm interested in their reasoning for going with a "grand opening" and subjecting the site being hammered instead of inviting groups of early adopters/beta testers and incrementally stress testing the system.
"There's no such thing as bad publicity" - but there is such a thing as going public before your technology is ready, and thus turning off all the early adopters.
Most of the geek/connected crowd has now heard of Cuil. And most have now tried it.
And, sadly for Cuil, most will never try it again. That's one hell of a wasted PR shot. Rookie mistake, huh.
I guess my early results were different, I often recall getting "better" results on Yahoo and AltaVista, but preferring Googles overall UI better, so I kept at it.
