As the world reads about the death of Flock – the social medical browser, Tekedia will like to recall the death of Cuil – the search engine that imagined annihilating Google. Of course that did not work out.
However, most of the brains behind Cuil are working in Google today. That is just the best part. Yes, some were ex-Googlers before they conspired to bring down the house that housed them. They failed, badly
Cuil was a search engine that organized web pages by content and displayed relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. Cuil said it had a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. It went live on July 28, 2008. Cuil’s servers were shut down on September 17, 2010, with later confirmations the service had ended.
Cuil was managed and developed largely by former employees of Google, Anna Patterson and Russell Power. PC Magazine reported that on the morning of September 17, 2010 “employees were told about Cuil’s demise […] and the servers were taken offline five hours later.”Laid-off employees were told they would not be paid. The shutdown reportedly came after an acquisition agreement fell through earlier in the week.