$33 Million bucks later: Another Google challenger goes down
 

Remember, Cuil? It was supposedly a new and better Google challenger... Well, it's down for the count: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/17/cui...down-for-good/

Now that was impressive that they raised $33M to create something most people knew would go no where.

It's VC money. It's all about having the right initial backers who are connected to the right VC circles.

I agree with you though--wasn't hard to see this coming considering the amount of R&D Google spends.

google need to watch our for Baidu

The domain name was fail.

my prediction: in about 1 year from now you'll see the same news regarding blekko.

wow $33mil...

money for nothing...

True. Even if you DID want to visit, it's hard to spell just form the pronounciation.

How are you supposed to pronounce it?

I'd assume like QLL. :1orglaugh

$33 million and they failed because they didn't spend even just a couple thousand more to get a better name. Just goes to show that the domain is one of the most important if not THE most important for a venture as big as that. Microsoft doesn't fuck around - Live.com, Bing.com...they know well enough that they would stand no chance if they were on a shitty unmemorable domain.

I always pronounced it "kwheel", though I had always thought that they intended it to be an alternate spelling of "cool" and if so, it was about as big of a fail as they could do at that short of DogShit.com.

:2 cents:

Yeah, the site was destined to fail with that name.

they should have bought my... CashForJesus.com

.

Never was a Google challenger, ever.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

next time give me 10%, i'll tell you how stupid the idea is and voilà - $29.7 million saved

I assume they VC's got blinded by the owners being ex google engineers.

it was supposed to "cool"

who? curl what

dumbass guys.. stupid domain.. bing/microsoft has spent tens of millions, yet barely have any search engine market share.. google 4 life

what the fuck is a cuil anyway?

33 million and the best they could come up with is cuil ?

then they should have bought cool.com :upsidedow

Google is fucking kick-ASS lately, how it shows you search results live before you can even hit "Search".
its unreal. no one will ever be able to compete with that.

thats what I said. It sounds like a french-canadian website. meh

The problem with search engines to make it work you need to have billions of servers which will crawl internet.

Never heard of it.

Should have started it with a better name

never heard of it! At least Cuil rings a few bells

Familiar story blinded by thinking they can re-create the same empire

'A wise old owl sat in an oak,
The more he heard, the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird.'

It was never meant to succeed. Anyone that knows anything about search engines or follows SEO and search marketing in a serious, saw this was not intended to succeed to start with. The results from the first day were horrible, did not improve with more time and their very basic idea "that all pages online need to be indexed" as the core idea for "better results" is wrong since a large % of those pages are spam and generated automatically and there is a reason Google does no longer index all pages for many years now. This was a old idea from early days that search engines finally got away from. It sounds good as marketing only to investors. There are also very big technical and mathematical problems with scale and assigning values (pagerank/webrank) to over a trillion pages in real time on an internet, that only google/bing/yahoo have managed to figure out with any real success. It will take much more than $33,000,000.00 to start a new Google or Bing. First of all, it will require a new core way to put values to pages in real time based on popularity which requires math formula like PageRank/HITS/webrank etc which can scale with accuracy forever. That is a huge math/technical problem by itself.

This Cuil was just a scam for tax write off or to scam investors. It was never meant to be a serious attempt at creating a real search engine. It was clear to some people from the start who know anything about search engines.

People do not understand that Google/Bing/Yahoo are not the only real search engines because of marketshare. They are the only real search engines because they are the only ones to successfully scale with the growth of internet.

No wonder nobody wanted to use it... :2 cents::1orglaugh

Wow it would be great to get in those VC circles. Bullshit your way into raising millions, doing next to nothing for 2 years while getting paid then close shop.

:thumbsup

i want to raise 33 million

Yeah, I checked that site up. They are just as good as google. Or so I think. If they turn their heads worldwide. Google is up for a challenge. The name is good too.

Google has more to fear from Facebook. I get more traffic from FB now than SEs

Read up on any mainstream marketing its transitioned from "hey you should be spamming google" to "hey go spam facebook and twitter".

No.. no I don't. lol