It's Official, but not Surprising: Cuil Bombs

Posted 12/30/2008 at 11:45am | by Paul Lilly

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Someone cue up Taps for the little search engine that couldn't. No, Cuil hasn't gone anywhere, and that's exactly the problem. Managed and developed by former Google employees, the $33 million startup had high hopes of dethroning Google as the go-to search engine. Well guess what? Surfers are still going to Google, and it doesn't appear the same can be said for Cuil.

It remains to be seen if Google has simply grown too large for another search engine to challenge its dominance, but whether or not that's true, it's going to take a much better effort than what Cuil managed to muster, which seemed doomed from the start. Poor performance, indexing methods that slowed down websites, and quirky search results all led to heavy criticism following Cuil's debut. And that was before VP of products Louis Monier resigned from the team. Talk about a confidence booster!

So where does that leave Cuil today? Not much of anywhere. After an initial flurry of activity following the search engine's hyped up debut, traffic has waned considerably .In the medical world, that kind of flatlining means its time to notify the next of kin. In this case, that would be Google, but something tells us they already know.

Image Credit: Alexa