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Cuil, the latest search engine startup to come out swinging from its corner through the hope of knocking out Google, is instead taking a cudgelling that could do it long-term damage as a credible contender.

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The company admitted broad media coverage attached Monday, primarily because it has former Google engineers in succession its team and because of its claim to have the world’s largest search index, but Cuil is now facing an angry backlash.

The site had performance and availability problems throughout cast day, and a growing chorus of hunt market observers has declared the instrument’s results to its queries unimpressive.

In addition, the site was launched by only a Web search engine, at a time when it’s considered a basic requirement for any search engine with aspirations of competing against Google to have at least some basic vertical research tabs for news articles, photos, maps and local business information.

Without the ability to collate general search results with photos, news articles, the increasingly popular video files and mapping information, a search engine is effectively unable to provide the form of “universal” search results that have become de riguer and that Google now consistently does.

In short, what looked take pleasure in a successfully architected public-relations launch is backfiring because the product has failed to meet the lofty expectations that were created.

Backed by reputable investors that have reportedly invested $33 million in it, Cuil will now have to go into injure control in place of riding the early momentum, and hope that end-users and industry observers disposition accord. it another chance once it works completely its kinks.

“First impressions calculate a lot,” said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, who on Monday morning was unable to bestow Cuil a thorough test because of the site’s doing problems.

While Cuil could become an interesting alternative to Google and the other major search engines, that will take some space of time. In hindsight, it might have been wiser for Cuil’s management to launch the site more quietly and give themselves time to improve it, Sterling said.

Instead, by making a big, noisy media splash, they gave themselves little room for error. “This much media coverage creates high expectations,” he said.

Indeed, Cuil came out with an in-your-face attitude, claiming to have the largest Web table of contents of any search engine: 120 billion Web pages, which Cuil states is “three times more than any other search engine.” It was a point that its officials made in interviews with media outlets prior to Monday’s debut.

But the site seemed unable to treat of some softball, straight-forward queries. For example, a search for “barack obama” returned on the first page of results mostly links to different pages of Obama’s official site, hardly useful if one is looking for a variety of sites on the presidential candidate. A search for “St. Louis, MO” initially returned naught results.

Among others, sift engine expert Danny Sullivan criticized Cuil for focusing upon the body the size of its table of contents—a practice that fell into disfavor years ago, as engines focused steady the quality of results—and questioned the basic validity of the lay privilege to.

“Yes, magnitude matters. You want to have a comprehensive crowd of documents from across the tissue. But having a distribute of documents doesn’t mean you are principally relevant,” Sullivan wrote on his Search Engine Land blog.

Sullivan also pointed out that Google hasn’t publicly stated the size of its Web index in years, and that just if Cuil’s is strictly three times as big, Google could quickly match that by simply becoming a borer less selective. Last Friday, Google, likely anticipating Cuil’s launch on Monday, before-mentioned its crawlers today “be careful” more than 1 trillion URLs on the Web.

Google declined to comment about Cuil’s claim and in addition declined to say how many links are in its Web index.

Sullivan and other search market observers said they were underwhelmed by the quality of Cuil’s results.

“With the huge caveat that nine queries are far from letting anyone conclude anything, I still didn’t come away with a sense that Cuil has Google-beating relevancy. Instead, it has some flaws though is taker of odds than many start-up search engines appear out of the box,” Sullivan wrote in another post Monday.

“I played through the site a fair bit when it turned on this morning. So far it doesn’t do much for me,” wrote Saul Hansell of The New York Times in a blog post titled “Cuil’s New Search Engine: Cheaper Than Google, on the other hand Not Better.”

Cuil, that is pronounced “cool,” got a resounding thumbs-down from The Wall Street Journal’s John Paczkowski in one AllThingsD post titled Totally UnCuil.

“If your mission is to beat Google in the search market, it’s probably wise to give your upstart search engine a name that people know by what mode to pronounce. It’s also wise to make sure that it appears in the first page of search results in opposition to its own name. Cuil, the pretender to gentility search engine that debuted today with aspirations of unseating Google, has manifestly done neither,” he wrote.

He’s not alone in his distaste for the company’s name. IDC algebraist Caroline Dangson flagged the name—she called it “terrible”—as some of the kind of she considers the company’s main challenges.

“Cuil has an uphill collision in getting more consumers to search its site instead of Google. Google wins hands down in the place of brand recognition among U.S. consumers,” she said via e-mail, adding that using Google has become a habit for a majority of search users.

According to a recent IDC survey, three-quarters of U.S. online consumers know Google being of the kind which an Internet brand and the majority like Google and put faith in it offers quality services, she said.

“Furthermore, Google also before that time has an established business model based on search advertising in what human being. it excels. Even if Cuil offers better search results, the company is not monetizing its service with advertising at this point and will not be accomplished to compete with Google in terms of reward,” she said.

Of pursue, on Monday, Cuil’s problems were much more serious than offering better results, considering how shaky its performance has been. At close to 5 p.m. Eastern Time the site was still returning error results, sententious precept it couldn’t process queries for the cause that its servers were overloaded.

“From the perspective of Web search technology, Cuil has a number of hurdles to overcome, for the reason that its neglect to survive a day in the sun today proves,” reported IDC analyst Susan Feldman.

The performance problems at Cuil are not likely due to a lack of technical expertise, but most probably an consummation of limited infrastructure available means, Feldman said in an e-mail interview.

“Scaling up to billions of queries and documents is a problem in and of itself. That is apparently the main hurdle that most startups have to jump. Doing this day and night, and keeping the index current while providing sub-second responses takes a toll on the performance of any system,” she before-mentioned. “The problem is that this requires server farms that are usually outside the scope of a start up, and therefore has constituted a barrier to entry.”