cuil
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Cuil was a search engine built to challenge Google, founded by former Googlers Anna Patterson and Russell Power together with Tom Costello. Instead of ranking pages by link popularity, it organized results by content and concepts, displayed longer result entries with thumbnail images, and claimed an index of 120 billion pages, three times Google's at the time. It also promised stronger privacy than rivals, pledging not to store users' search activity or IP addresses. It launched to heavy media hype in July 2008 and raised a total of $33 million in venture funding.
02 / cuil FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
TechCrunch (19 Sep 2010) reports Cuil shut after a last-minute acquisition collapsed (deal at final signatures the prior Wednesday then fell apart); employees were told they would not be paid. The 17 Sep 2010 TechCrunch piece (opened) had already reported the site down, staff unpaid that week, $33M raised 2007–08, and 'little traffic' by Dec 2008. Search Engine Land 20 Sep 2010 recaps the same failed-deal shutdown. No filing invents a valuation comparison.
TechCrunch 19 Sep 2010: last-minute acquisition at final signatures fell apart, then shutdown.
TechCrunch 17 and 19 Sep 2010: remaining employees were not paid that week / told to forget about getting paid.
TechCrunch 17 Sep 2010: by December 2008 Cuil had little traffic after a July 2008 launch.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
TechCrunch 17 Sep 2010: Cuil gone offline, former employees say it is down for good and staff unpaid. Follow-up 19 Sep 2010: 'unceremoniously shut down on Thursday.' Search Engine Land 20 Sep 2010: Thursday night Cuil went offline after acquisition talks failed; employees told to pack up, servers offline later that day.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Cuil's servers were shut down on September 17, 2010; employees were reportedly told of the shutdown only hours before and missed their final paychecks.
- 02
In 2012, Google acquired seven of Cuil's pending patent applications covering search-result display and user-interface designs.
- 03
The $33 million raised was venture funding, not a disclosed loss; no reliable loss figure, loss subject, period or basis was publicly disclosed, so no loss amount is recorded.