Remember Cuil? If you don’t remember what Cuil does you might however remember the name: Cuil has become a regularly used adjective to describe a hyped product that epically fails to meet expectations.
If you do remember Cuil you might be surprised to know that it’s actually still going…well if you can call it that. From its initial launch spike Cuil has quickly faded and never recovered. For a company with $33 million in funding that promised to be the next Google, the stats aren’t great. Alexa ranks the site at 12,871…that’s 4,000 worse that what we rank in Alexa, and this site was funded on the smell of an oily rag and several cartons of red wine. Their traffic chart isn’t any prettier either:
Compete is showing an internal server error as I type this post so I can’t grab the stats there, but the toolbar server is still up and gives Cuil a rank of 17,944. Quantcast doesn’t direct measure the site, but even allowing for that the numbers are embarrassing:
There simply can’t be a business case on these numbers: even if they managed to get premium rates on advertising there’s still not anywhere near enough page views to cover the running costs Cuil would have with sales, engineers etc.
Greylock Partners, Madrone Capital Partners and Tugboat Ventures must be getting close to pulling the pin: the longer Cuil operates the more of their $33 million is lost, and the resale value of the assets wouldn’t be all that great either…after all, who would want to buy a failed search engine.
