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Now we get it: Publicists at Google knew that Cuil was going to launch today, with coverage in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. How did they know? Because reporters called them for comment last week, seeking a response to Cuil's claim that it has the largest index of any search engine. That's why last Friday, Google's flacks hastily typed up a blog post announcing that Google had reached the 1-trillion-URL mark, slapped the names of a couple of software engineers on it, and made sure the national media were aware of this awesome story. Normally, a milestone event like this — 1 trillion URLs!!! — would be announced on a Monday, not a Friday. As a former search engine builder myself, here's what I think: Cuil is a much better pop-culture media story than it is a search engine right now. But Google's image-wranglers are aware their company is now the Goliath to everyone else's David in journalists' simplified minds. It may be folklore, but that kind of story only has one ending.