It's all over for Cuil

[bill]

It's not offical yet, but it sounds like Cuil is throwing in the towel.

Cuil Goes Down, And We Hear It’s Down For Good [techcrunch.com]

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.

[driller41]

This was doomed from the start, they were never going to overturn a major search engine with a direct frontal assault - they needed to attack from the rear and provide the next 'big idea' - whatever that is of course.

[jecasc]

Well - they tried, they failed.

I wonder if some of those dancing on their virutal grave here have ever even tried.

[StoutFiles]

When Cuil first launched everyone wanted them to succeed...they were given every chance and failed because of one big reason: they did NOT listen to their user base, claiming them "haters" when they pointed out Cuil's faults. Had Cuil actively tried to improve upon the complaints, they may have had a working product.

It seems like Cuil was, from the very beginning, a search engine that wanted to take off quickly and sell out when a huge profit could be made, mostly by making extraordinary claims about number of pages indexed and the low cost of doing so. They spidered nonstop, used images with other people's products, and outright stole globs of content with their automated encyclopedia. Their takeoff lasted about one day, deservedly. We all want a real competitor to Google, not a thief/poser, and that is why Cuil died not with a bang, but a whisper.

[Rugles]

Expiration Date: 30-dec-2015

Who has beat me to the back order?

[IanKelley]

Most of the members posting to that day 1 discussion were happy for Google to have competition

I think asas111's point is that Google did not, in fact, have competition in Cuil. Anyone who thought they did was projecting their dreams :-)

Cuil would of been great for the Iphone/ipad

Humorously irrelevant results fail on any device.

[netmeg]

It was kind of pretty, but I never heard or saw anything about it after the first week or so. So it fell out of my brain. Probably fell out of a lot of people's brains.

[dstiles]

It was a contributor to the meta-search engine StartPage / aka ixquick.

[McSpike]

I'll pay $5000 for domain name! :D

[SEOMike]

I remember them getting so much hype so fast. It was interesting to hear people from non technical jobs asking if I'd heard of Cuil the "Google killer." I had high hopes for them until I kept coming back to the same crappy results.

I agree that Cuil's bot was terrible. On Jan 21st of 09 they were basically DOSing me trying to open port 21 on my webserver.

RIP Cuil. Next time, be quiet until you get it right!

[jmccormac]

From the completely ignorant, makey-uppy twee Irish history and claims about the word Cuil representing knowledge rather than 'fly','bug' or 'arse', to the utterly clueless approach to search index quality and matching, Cuil was a triumph of PR and a complete failure to meet expectations. There is a rather apt one word Irish expression to describe Cuil.

Regards...jmcc

[machine11]

Redz is awful,
their sales reps must have called 15 of my websites on the 1800 numbers trying to sell me a good ranking position on their engine.

Matter of fact, when I call web/net friends, I always pretend Im a redz sales rep because they've been called as well and can't stand them... lol

[Quadrille]

Just think where they might be today if they'd started quietly and just done their darndest to build a great site.

Sad for the big brains that got hurt; a lesson for PR-obsessed 'venture capitalists'.

And joy for all us poor folk who always knew that style can't win out over substance forever.

[BarryStCyr]

Think I could pickup the domain name cheap?