An age old bad expression is "Any press, is Good Press" so lets see it in action. Cuil as most of you know has been tearing up the twitter lines just as fast as the earth quake in L.A. So what is the big deal, for one everyone hates it, and if they don't have it there aren't supporting in with positive notes on twitter. For those of you who don't know ( i just found out too) Cuil is pronounced Cool and is a Celtic word. They were started by some old Google people who wanted to take on Google. Very noble, but not advised. Here is how they are doing.
Lets look at their stats from Alexa.com
| Yesterday | 1 wk. Avg. | 3 mos. Avg. | 3 mos. Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.004% | 095.2605668016104% | 0.0061016718% |  5503% |
Traffic Rank for Cuil.com: 
Alexa traffic rank based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach)
| Yesterday | 1 wk. Avg. | 3 mos. Avg. | 3 mos. Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31,58542 | 110,74996 | 1,19090,420 | 2,7445434,8048237 |
Page Views per user for Cuil.com:
The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site
| Yesterday | 1 wk. Avg. | 3 mos. Avg. | 3 mos. Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 972.6 | 2.7 | 2.5 | 21% |
Page Views per user for Google.com:
The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site
| Yesterday | wk. Avg. | 3 mos. Avg. | 3 mos. Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6.7451 | 617 | 7.016236 |  2% |
I found this last numer very interesting. If you are surfing on Google how many pages does the average person look at. I think this metric can cut both ways. First it is saying you took 7 pages to find what you like, or it could be saying you were shopping around and found 7 pages of interest. Or it could be saying your results were so bad that it took your visitor 7 pages to find what they liked. Or it could be saying it took your visitor 7 times to refine their search to find what they liked.
SO the fact that Cuil has only 2.5 pages per visit is telling me two things. One they are less than Google and two my website beats theres. You could make the assumption becuase they only have 2.5 pages as the average they are either very good and people are finding what they want or really bad and people are saying "i hate this" and leaving. With the comments coming from twitter, i will have to make an educated guess and say it is the later of the two assumptions.
While were still on this graph lets not over look the 972 page visits per visitor yesterday. This has to be some kind of a bug, or accounting for spiders but if that was a real number i would say Google your numbered.
Here is a graph showing Culi.com in Red and Google In Blue. This graph is showing the twitter noise volume for each of the respective companies key words. Now most of what i have seen today has been negative from Cuil. But lets check and see what is popping up most.
This graph shows the most common words attached to Cuil and to Google. If you notice Cuil has had more exposure over the day and more things have been said about it over Google. Is this odd? I don't really think so I use Google everyday and never mention it in a post or a tweet. However when things are new you would expect lots of mentions. I.E why they are mentioned more in twitter than Google. But not many of the words are bad. I see lots of regurgitation of press release information and other articles which were on main blogs.
This last graph which I would like to present is a Alexa graph showing their traffic spike. Yes it was a launch, and yes it is very little so it looks like a much bigger event than it really was. However if lets go back to the question at hand. Is bad press a good thing. We can only look at the short term effects with this situation, and I would have to say it has generated them considerable buzz. Now is that a bad thing because I have a bad impression of them. Of course it is, but that can be fixed. What can not be fixed is no launch at all. They are trying, which means they are not done, and there is the possibility for change with their product and to come back and knock it out. So in short I would hate to have to deal with bad press, thought it can still be a good thing.
