As we reported last week, search engine Cuil was unceremoniously shut down on Thursday, and there were reports that employees were told to go home and forget about getting paid.
New sources tells us that Cuil was in the final stages of an acquisition as of last Wednesday, and everything was in place except the final signatures. Then the deal fell apart for some reason.
Or put another way, Cuil found one last way to fail.
There are certain assets, particularly algorithms and patents, that may have some value to certain companies, we’ve heard from one of our sources.
A complication may have been over employees, which were supposed to go with the deal and be taken care of by the buyer.
Regardless, our understanding is that Cuil is trying to regroup and get the site back live, and another deal, or the old deal, may be closed soon.
Either way, at best it’s a soft landing. More details as we gather them. There are only a very few buyers who’d have much interest in Cuils assets – particularly Google and Microsoft.
Cuil was a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuil has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuil is the polar opposite of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page. Powerset’s indexing costs, therefore, should be...
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