Cuil Goes Offline, Future Not So Cool

Thursday night, Cuil, the Google killer, went offline. The first report I’ve seen about this was Friday afternoon at TechCrunch, it is like no one noticed for several hours.

TechCrunch reports Cuil went down after last minute acquisition talks failed. They said “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.” The day after, Thursday, employees were reportedly told to pack up and then later on in that day the servers went offline.

It is believed the service may go back up online again so they can lure a potential buyer of their algorithms, index and technology. But is is unclear as to how cool Cuil’s future will be.

Cuil officially launched in July 2008. In Danny’s article, he wrote “Can any start-up search engine “be the next Google?” Many have wondered this, and today’s launch of Cuil (pronounced “cool”) may provide the best test case since Google itself overtook more established search engines.” For our past articles on Cuil, see our Cuil archives.

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search Engines: Cuil


About The Author: is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

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  • Ruth_OL

    That’s very sad for their staff, but really it was a very poor service and it’s hardly a surprise that it’s failed.

  • http://www.michael-martinez.com/ Michael Martinez

    It was actually a very good service that was very poorly understood by people who can’t get their heads out of link spam.

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