Comment by ricardo81

There's one great example of a company that did that and managed to go viral on their release, Cuil. They claimed to have a Google size of search index. Unfortunately for them their search results weren't good and so that visibility quickly disappeared.

Going further back, AlltheWeb was actually pretty decent but was eventually bought by Overture and then Yahoo and ended up in their graveyard.

For everyone else it's the longer grind trying to gain visibility.