PR is often thought of as something of a black art, but for the jobbing hack it’s more of an occasional saviour and consistent nuisance. Its greatest practitioners are worthy of grudging respect and the right ‘strategy’ - an irritating PR buzz word in its own right - can undoubtedly yield impressive results, but what happens when there’s nothing behind the bluster?

Last week, the largest website launch I can remember in a long while offered an answer. Cuil, we were told, was built by former Google and AltaVista engineers. This was the Google killer, the bloggers whispered. When I heard that the site searches three times as many pages as Google and had already received $33m in venture funding, I was sold. The PR guys had done their job - a little too well, it would emerge.

So far, my experiences of the site itself have been hugely underwhelming. The most complimentary thing you can say about Cuil is that it’s an endearing curio, an eccentric diversion from the serious stuff happening over at Google. The results it throws up are certainly different. The problem is they’re mostly irrelevant.

Attempt a search for some specific editorial content – a Duncan Bannatyne interview, for example – and Cuil doesn’t even seem to be trying. The results it returns include a handful of pages on the other dragons, a couple of news stories that mention his name and, confusingly, a wiki page on young entrepreneur Adam Hildreth. 121 billion web pages indexed apparently. Who cares if you can’t find what you’re looking for?

And all that’s before you’ve considered the downright confusing and irrelevant pictures that accompany the stories; it’s bad enough that an interview with former Dragon Richard Farleigh appears in the top results in a search for a Duncan Bannatyne interview. But why on earth is it accompanied by a picture of Jimmy Carr?  

Of course, I wasn’t the only one making unwelcome comparisons. The site was initially overwhelmed with launch day interest, with the 50 million queries on its first day of operation well beyond its founders’ expectations. Emphatic evidence that there is a genuine appetite for a serious alternative to Google, certainly, but also salt in the wound of what became something of a PR disaster. Hubristic claims for a product are damaging when the product is ordinary or, in Cuil’s case, not even ready.

Bad publicity is well deserved if the PR machine is more efficient than the product. If the developers had gone for a soft launch and slapped ‘beta’ all over the site, the feedback would probably be more along the lines of a promising work in progress and a subtle, slow burn PR campaign could have ensued. Instead, even relative technophobes like me are blogging about it.

© Crimson Business Ltd. 2008