Like others have said, Cuil's failure was a huge PR push, not the release. I'm sure that they did actually get a ton of useful feedback from it that they can use to improve their service. In this case, though, it came at the cost of being branded a failure by many people.
If they had avoided the boastful claims and stuck to low profile releases, they could have gathered useful feedback without the expectation of being a great search engine. Perhaps if they had tried this they actually would have managed to get themselves up to google's level by the time the general public became aware of them.
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Like others have said, Cuil's failure was a huge PR push, not the release. I'm sure that they did actually get a ton of useful feedback from it that they can use to improve their service. In this case, though, it came at the cost of being branded a failure by many people.
If they had avoided the boastful claims and stuck to low profile releases, they could have gathered useful feedback without the expectation of being a great search engine. Perhaps if they had tried this they actually would have managed to get themselves up to google's level by the time the general public became aware of them.