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. → Read More
Cuil, the much maligned search engine that at one time had hopes of toppling Google, has gone offline. And from what we hear from former employees, it’s not just a temporary outage, it may be done for good. Those employees who are still with the company apparently weren’t paid this week, and they’re starting to say they’re looking for new jobs.
The company had raised $33 million in venture capital in 2007 and 2008. we first started covering Cuil in late 2007 when it was in stealth. It launched in July 2008 but a month later their VP Product had bailed. By December 2008 it had little traffic and since then things have only gotten stranger.
To be clear, we’ve confirmed nothing right now except that the site is down, the rest of what we’re hearing is from former employees. We’ll update as we hear back from the company and/or investors. Meanwhile, it’s in the DeadPuil. → Read More
Something tells me the wheels may be coming off the car at Cuil, the once promising search startup that had one of the most miserable launch debuts in Silicon Valley history.
On April 8 the company launched a new service, cpedia, which creates automated articles about queries instead of simply returning search results. The results are sort of strange, but as an experiment it certainly has legs. As in, I find it interesting, not necessarily that it can be a business. For things not covered well by Wikipedia, it can be useful and I can imagine, years from now, after many iterations, well, you get what I’m saying.
Some of the feedback on the new service wasn’t so positive (GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wins best title with Cuil Failed at Search, Now Fails to Copy Wikipedia). And Cuil CEO Tom Costello has now made the extremely unwise decision to lash out at, well, just about everyone. → Read More
Remember Cuil? It was that stealth search engine that launched with a massive amount of buzz because a few former Googlers were behind it. Then it got even more press when it fell flat. Well, it’s still around. But you never hear about it anymore. Still, it got all that press whereas plenty of other search startups hardly get any. So one of those came up with a cute gimmick.
The search engine Duck Duck Go has obtained the domains Cuiler.com and Cuilest.com to give itself a cooler front end. Smart move. After all, it put it on my radar, and after trying out the engine, it seems very, very solid. It’s a simple engine that doesn’t clutter its pages with unnecessary results. It offers tailored results for regular search as well as information, and shopping results. And, for the adventurous types, there’s an “I’m feeling ducky” button. And, unlike Google, the service says it keeps no information from its searches. → Read More
Here’s a head scratcher. BusinessWeek named search engine Cuil, which launched prematurely, lost their VP Product and now has near zero traffic, as one of the most successful U.S. startups of 2008.
Why? They say it attracted lots of attention when it launched (true, but it wasn’t positive attention), and they say that Cuil has a larger search index than Google (which doesn’t appear to be true). They miss Cuil’s big possible tech advantage, which is IP on how they handle search queries that may be much cheaper than the way Google and others do it.
BusinessWeek generally has intelligent coverage of startups. This time, they blew it. Cuil may yet live to see success, but 2008 was a bad, bad year for them and they had no place on this list. → Read More
Remember the ill-fated Google-killer Cuil? Named ‘Cuill’ and very much in stealth mode for the first part of the year, they finally emerged end of July 2008 with a ‘massive’ search engine that would rival the most popular search engines of our time with an enormous index, an innovative interface and some nifty features.
Rival, it never did. The launch of the search engine was nothing but a classic PR trainwreck, with much hype and little to show for. Cuil failed to deliver good enough results to drive anyone to change their search behavior, and quickly became the subject of backlash and criticism because of their poor performance and indexing methods that actually took websites down in the process. Last time we reported about Cuil, was when their VP of Products (and AltaVista founder) Louis Monier quietly resigned from the startup. → Read More
Louis Monier, Cuil’s VP Product, quietly resigned from the newly launched search engine last week, we’ve heard from a reliable source.
This is a big blow to the troubled search engine – Monier was recruited away from Google a year ago, where he was working on advanced search products. Prior to Google he was the head of search at eBay and was the cofounder and CTO of AltaVista. He is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of Internet search according to search experts Danny Sullivan, John Battelle and others. → Read More
Yahoo has highlighted a few more implementations of BOSS, the search API it launched in early July that allows third party websites to incorporate Yahoo search functionality seamlessly into their sites.
This is the second time Yahoo has showcased the fruits of BOSS developers. In early August, Yahoo drew attention to 4HourSearch, the Cuil knock-off formerly known as Yuil; PlayerSearch, a sports-focused search engine; Newsline, a tool for plotting news items on a timeline; and Tianamo, a 3D search visualization tool for Windows machines with Java installed.
Now we’re presented with three more implementations: 123People, askBOSS, and BuildaSearch. → Read More
An anonymous tipster wrote to us this morning to tell us that Cuil, the ill-fated “Google Killer,” has unleashed its Twiceler indexing bot on websites across the globe and in the process, has brought many sites down.
“I don’t know what spawned it, but when Cuil attempts to index a site, it does so by completely hammering it with traffic,” the tipster wrote. “So much, that it completely brings the site down. We’re 24 hours into this “index” of the site, and I’ve had to restrict traffic to the site down to 2 packets per second, while discarding the rest, or otherwise it makes the site unusable.”
The Admin Zone forums are abuzz over Cuil’s overzealous method for indexing. Countless posters on the site have said that their websites have been brought down because of the Twiceler robot and one user said it “leeched enormous amounts of bandwidth — nearly 2GB this month until it was blocked. It visited nearly 70,000 times!” → Read More
The new Cuil search engine apparently got a bit more traffic than the team anticipated immediately after launch a couple of hours ago. Everyone is trying it out to decide for themselves how disruptive it may be to the old guard search guys. For now, you’ll have to wait, a message on the site says “We’ll be back soon…Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity. Thanks for your patience.” Launching a startup ain’t easy. And flatlining right after your launch is more of a rite of passage than an embarrassment. Here’s hoping Cuil is cool again by morning. Update: Yay! It’s back. CrunchBase Information Cuil Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Search engine Cuil launched earlier this evening, claiming a bigger index size (120 billion web pages) than Google or any other search engine. The pedigree of the founders and execs, which includes three ex senior Googlers, means the service will be compared to Google from day one. And the way they will be compared is index size and, more importantly, relevance/ranking of results. We’ve been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn’t appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant. A search for Dog returns 280 million results on Cuil and 498 million on Google. Judging relevance of results is subjective, but Google returns Wikipedia as the first result, then dog.com. Cuil returns Dog.com, wikipedia isn’t listed on the first page of results. Both are meaningful results, but Google is better. More searches, Cuil v. Google: Apple (83 m v. 571 million) – neither mention the fruit. France (102 m v. 1.5 billion) – Cuil’s category refinement makes their results better for this query. Stonehenge (800k v. 8.5 million). Silicon Valley (3.2 m v. 24 m). Techcrunch (600k v. 6.5 m). It seems pretty clear that Google’s index of web pages is significantly larger than Cuil’s unless we’re randomly choosing the wrong queries. Based on the queries above, Google is averaging nearly 10x the number of results of Cuil. And Cuil’s ranking isn’t as good as Google’s based on the pure results returned from both queries. Where Cuil excels is with the related categories, which return results that are extremely relevant. With Google, we’ve all gotten used to trying a slightly different search to get the refined results we need. Cuil does a good job of guessing what we’ll want next and presents that in the top right widget. That means Cuil saves time for more research based queries. And I want to reemphasize that Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine. CrunchBase Information Cuil Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Menlo Park based Cuil will launch later this evening with an index of 120 billion web pages, making them arguably the most comprehensive search engine on the web (Google doesn’t disclose the size of their index, although they claim to know about a trillion unique web pages) (Update: see our very early testing here). They’ve also dropped one of the “l’s” from their name – previously the company was “Cuill.” Either way, it’s pronounced “cool.” The super-stealth search project was founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello (CEO) and Anna Patterson (VP Engineering) were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are also ex-Google employees, and the company has been the subject of intense speculation over the last couple of years. Much of the secret sauce of Cuil is in the way they index the web and handle actual queries by users. Both are costly to scale, and Cuil claims to have found a way to massively reduce those costs. That allows them to run the search engine a lot cheaper, even at Google-scale should it ever reach that point. By some estimates, Google spends a billion dollars a year to run the back end infrastructure of it’s search business. Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites. They do not simply catalog keywords on a site and then rank the site based on its importance. They also work to understand how words are related (France – cheese – wine, for example), to return more relevant results to users. This is a semantic approach to search, but very different from Powerset’s natural language approach. Powerset uses artificial intelligence to try to understand what sentences on a website actually mean. Cuil, by comparison, simply tries to properly categorize and file a web page, even if the category name doesn’t appear on the site. That means users search the same way they always have, but Cuil will try to return better results via refinements in a “explore by category” module to the right of results. A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for “water dogs,” “crossbreed,” “cocker spaniel,” etc. Some of these related terms do not include the term “dog.” Cuil is experimenting with a new type of search interface as well. Results are shown in three columns and contain an image and more → Read More
