Cuil, I Hardly Knew Ye

September 20, 2010 1:37 PM

Former Cuil employees are saying that the search engine is down for good.

Going live on 28 July 2008, it was almost immediately panned for slow response times and inaccurate, sometimes NSFW [link NSFW] search results. Even after adding features like Facebook integration and its own encyclopedia, Cuil continued to lose what little traffic it had captured. Unsurprising that "employees were told about Cuil's demise around 11 a.m. Friday, and the servers were taken offline five hours later."

posted by bayani (55 comments total)

I guess I don't know everything, but I'd never even heard of this one...
posted by randomkeystrike at 1:39 PM on September 20, 2010

Cuil? Never heard of it.
posted by Malice at 1:40 PM on September 20, 2010

Was Cuil ever touted as a "google killer"? Other than by Cuil itself?
posted by bjrn at 1:42 PM on September 20, 2010

Microsoft is losing about $300 million annually to be in the search engine business, so I imagine it's hard to get profitable as a startup in the space.
posted by GuyZero at 1:42 PM on September 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

I'd heard of it, I tried it, and... well.

Breaking into anything is hard. Breaking into search in a world where the market has one major player that earned its position through quality and one noteworthy competitor (Bing) and almost nobody else worth mentioning - that's really, really hard.

But Cuil didn't deserve for a minute to play in those leagues. Good shot, guys, nice try, but next time please try to stop sucking so hard before you go live.
posted by Tomorrowful at 1:43 PM on September 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

Yep ... they burned through $33 million of funding and couldn't find an acquirer.

Employees were told at the shutdown that they wouldn't be getting paid. "There are certain assets, particularly algorithms and patents, that may have some value to certain companies ..."
posted by ericb at 1:44 PM on September 20, 2010

Cuil's problem was that they came out of the gate claiming to be bigger, faster, and better than Google.

That, and the whole not-working-correctly problem.
posted by mkultra at 1:45 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Plus the traditional awful, hard-to-spell-and-pronounce name.
posted by maxwelton at 1:46 PM on September 20, 2010 [5 favorites]

I tried it once, for a mainstream search I knew very well, and the results were putrid. Never went back.
posted by cell divide at 1:48 PM on September 20, 2010

Plus the traditional awful, hard-to-spell-and-pronounce name.

Exactly. Too esoteric.

"The Irish ancestry of Anna Patterson's husband Tom Costello sparked the name Cuil, which the company states is taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character, Fion mac Cumhaill, they erroneously refer to as Finn MacCuil. The company says that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and hazel."

posted by ericb at 1:48 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh snap, Cpedia.com is down too... That encyclopedia was less reliable than Encyclopaedia Dramatica and Conservapedia togheter... The Lulz will be missed.
posted by CitoyenK at 1:52 PM on September 20, 2010

Was there ever any positive press for Cuil other than regurgitated press releases?
posted by mikeh at 1:54 PM on September 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

An absolute disaster from start to finish. It's actually pretty difficult to conjure up something that is immediately unappealing on every single level from the very first moment you clap eyes on it, but Cuil somehow managed.
posted by fire&wings at 1:57 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Exactly. Too esoteric.
"The Irish ancestry of Anna Patterson's husband Tom Costello sparked the name Cuil, which the company states is taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character, Fion mac Cumhaill, they erroneously refer to as Finn MacCuil. The company says that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and hazel."

Esoteric and wrong. Two horrible tastes that taste even worse combined!
posted by kmz at 1:58 PM on September 20, 2010

Esoteric and wrong.

Which makes it a perfect for Cuil's search results!
posted by Tomorrowful at 2:00 PM on September 20, 2010 [13 favorites]

How do companies like this get funding? Did they just have some really convincing talkers? My guess is that it was something like "even if we get 0.5% of the search market, that's worth a $billion."
posted by smackfu at 2:02 PM on September 20, 2010

How do companies like this get funding?

See: Dot-com bubble (1995 - 2000) and Tulip Mania (1637).
posted by ericb at 2:07 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

Soo-ill? Quill? What? Cuil?, Hold on, let me google it.
posted by longsleeves at 2:08 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Thomas Tusser: "A fool and his money are soon parted."
posted by ericb at 2:09 PM on September 20, 2010

Cuil went live in 2008, so forget the dot-com bubble.

Actually, a shakeout of all the many crappy unprofitable wannabes in the search, social networking, and Web 2.0 spaces is long overdue. What weird venture capital IV is running into these guys' veins? How long can you lose money before you lose your business?
posted by fourcheesemac at 2:10 PM on September 20, 2010

Tulip Mania sounds like a good name for a K-pop group.
posted by bayani at 2:10 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Was there ever any positive press for Cuil other than regurgitated press releases?

Cuil's overhyped launch is another example of the media's inability to comprehend the web and social media. Haystack is another.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 2:11 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

How long can you lose money before you lose your business?

If you look at Bing, you can lose money in perpetuity if you're "strategic".
posted by GuyZero at 2:12 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

As discussed previously on Metafilter. I feel sad for Cuil, simply because I fear the team didn't quite understand how hard what they were doing would be. Which is a bit baffling given their resumes. But now we're down to two large general search engines, Google and Bing.
posted by Nelson at 2:17 PM on September 20, 2010

Jeez you people who don't know what Cuil was. Is it so hard to Alta Vista it?
posted by mazola at 2:18 PM on September 20, 2010 [6 favorites]

Alta vista and astalavista.box.sk ;
All I needed in the 90's...
posted by CitoyenK at 2:22 PM on September 20, 2010 [7 favorites]

The initial press was overblown to put it kindly. I think at the time, after playing with it was, hmm, someone got paid to pimp this out. It made no sense what so ever EXCEPT as venture capital bait. Seriously, if you plan to strike at the king be sure that it is a killing blow.
posted by jadepearl at 2:22 PM on September 20, 2010

Is it so hard to Alta Vista it?

Ah man. I used Excite back in the day.
posted by bayani at 2:22 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

> ...taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character, Fion mac Cumhaill, they erroneously refer to as Finn MacCuil...

Ah, if only they'd called it Cumhaill!
posted by chavenet at 2:27 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Hotbot was where it was at.

But man, Cuil really was a bad search engine. The results were horrible.
posted by SpacemanStix at 2:29 PM on September 20, 2010 [5 favorites]

It was ass* anyhow.

*French joke. "cul" = "ass"
posted by L'Estrange Fruit at 2:29 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Employees were told at the shutdown that they wouldn't be getting paid.

Death's too good for 'em.
posted by JHarris at 2:30 PM on September 20, 2010

Cuil went live in 2008, so forget the dot-com bubble.

Not my point. The funding of Cuil is reminiscent of that period. There have been some questionable venture investments in the past few years ... even in this "down economy."
posted by ericb at 2:32 PM on September 20, 2010

I'll add, too, that when you get the public's attention with an upcoming product, you only get one shot out of the gate to get it right. There's no real "do over" if you fail drop the ball, as it's pretty much impossible to regain the public trust to give you a second chance. And they messed it up. Companies that have the benefit of the doubt and are providing a fine service are having a hard time competing with Google, because it's almost impossible to catch up with them, even if you were to grant, for the sake of argument, an identical product. I'm surprised Cuil stuck it out this long.
posted by SpacemanStix at 2:32 PM on September 20, 2010

There's no official word yet, but the site is down right now, and TechCrunch reports that former Cuil employees are saying it's gone for good.

Wow. I was expecting some sort of branded landing page or something with no functionality. But it just ain't there no more.
posted by brundlefly at 2:35 PM on September 20, 2010

So you're saying Cuil has been iced?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:37 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

fire&wings : It's actually pretty difficult to conjure up something that is immediately unappealing on every single level from the very first moment you clap eyes on it, but Cuil somehow managed.

"Ok, you can have this shit sandwich and a punch in the groin, or use Cuil..."

"Hmmm... how old is the shit?"
posted by quin at 2:44 PM on September 20, 2010

I thought it was just an artistic misspelling of "cool".

Anyway, totally not cuil.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:57 PM on September 20, 2010

I guess this is my last chance to argue that it really should be pronounced with a soft c, like "swill".

Can I have a hamburger?
posted by Reverend John at 3:06 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Can I have a hamburger?

Cuil Theory for the uninitiated.
posted by bayani at 3:13 PM on September 20, 2010 [6 favorites]

How do companies like this get funding? Did they just have some really convincing talkers?

I should imagine, as these things go, it's one of the easier sells, as long as you actually have something (anything) different to the incumbents. Search is a proven market, with an established revenue model and leverage to get into many other aspects of the web.

The prize for getting it right is apparent - how rich would you be right now if you'd invested $33million in Google in 1999? Of course, before Google did it, it wasn't apparent at all...

If I was sitting picking individual, personal investments then I wouldn't choose a search engine startup. But if I was backing a few hundred startups in the expectation that 1 in 20 (or whatever) would make it, then a search engine that at least appeared to offer something new might as well be one of them.
posted by robertc at 3:18 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Let's just remember the good times.
posted by mazola at 3:23 PM on September 20, 2010

Duuuuude. Not Cuil. Not Cuil at all.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 3:54 PM on September 20, 2010

astalavista.box.sk

Oh man, I'd forgotten about this.
posted by Jimbob at 4:09 PM on September 20, 2010

The list of people surprised by this turn of events:
posted by Rhomboid at 4:57 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Totally uncuil.
posted by alms at 4:58 PM on September 20, 2010

I still use DuckDuckGo once in a while, especially since they seem to scrub content mills like eHow from the results.
posted by benzenedream at 5:18 PM on September 20, 2010

Sucky thing sucks. Or suicks in honor of cuil, RIP.
posted by Mister_A at 5:18 PM on September 20, 2010

Cuil was unfortunately branded a "Google killer" from day 1 but never got to the point of decent search results. Searching my own name brought up my legitimate results, but associated them with pornographic images and images of double-decker buses. Cuil did so poorly, primarily in co-mingling of image and content results (to look as though the image came from a domain).
posted by Doug Stewart at 6:09 PM on September 20, 2010

Cuil culled.
posted by hangashore at 7:30 PM on September 20, 2010

I just assumed it returned all of the results in Welsh and never used it.
posted by klangklangston at 8:20 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Surprised they lasted as long as they did, especially after this: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/14/cuil-ceo-rips-users-asks-them-to-please-shut-up/
posted by jenh at 8:48 PM on September 20, 2010

jenh: "cuil-ceo-rips-users-asks-them-to-please-shut-up/"

It's sad that the execs decided to shaft the remaining workers when they were so profligate with the spending a few years ago. I'm going to self-link to my earlier Cuil piece concerning Tom Costello and Sarah Carey (the writer of this article).
posted by meehawl at 9:53 PM on September 20, 2010

I use Bing on my Android phone, and on my desktop and laptop running Ubuntu and Chrome. Microsoft's targeted advertising algorithm probably has a special ironic hipster mode just for me.
posted by miyabo at 12:18 PM on September 21, 2010

I just feel sorry for all those poor venture capitalists who now have to rent apartments and drive shitty old cars and work for a living. Must be tough.
posted by fourcheesemac at 6:50 AM on September 26, 2010