If you’re a Web geek, the biggest news today is the launch of Cuil.com, a new search engine with a strange Irish name (which is pronounced “cool”) and what it claims is a really big, er… index. The topic has been dominating Techmeme for the better part of the day, with the official Cuil launch post only recently taking over the top spot from Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch post about it. Everyone has an opinion about the company, from the size of their index to their (allegedly) dumb name, or the earth-shattering revelation that they are going to have a tough time competing with a little outfit called Google (gee — ya think?)

On Twitter, the Web 2.0 water-cooler, most of the discussion has revolved around the ways in which the new search service sucks — or rather, is an “epic fail,” as the kids like to say. Searching for the company’s own name doesn’t turn up the search engine’s website (Doh!), and searching for other common terms or names either doesn’t turn up anything, or a small number of inadequate and/or stupid results. The site is down. The whole Irish legend about Finn and the salmon of knowledge is weird. There’s no way it can compete against Google — and so on.

At the risk of being seen as not critical enough, I’m going to throw a vote out there for Cuil. I think the service sounds like an interesting alternative to Google, or Yahoo or MSN for that matter — not that I ever use those services, of course. I don’t particularly care about the size of Cuil’s index (insert double entendre here). But I am interested in having alternatives for search. For me, it’s about finding what I want quickly, and the reality is that Google continues to be littered with poor quality results. If Cuil can solve that problem, then I hope they stick around.