Cuil

Cuil

The Cuil homepage
Type of site	Search engine
Available in	Multilingual
Owner	Cuil, Inc.
Website	[1] (restored link with web.archive.org)
Launched	July 28, 2008
Current status	Down

Cuil (/ˈkuːl/ KOOL) was a search engine that organized web pages by content and displayed relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. Cuil said it had a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. It went live on July 28, 2008. Cuil's servers were shut down on September 17, 2010, with later confirmations the service had ended.

Cuil was managed and developed largely by former employees of Google, Anna Patterson and Russell Power. The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. The company had raised $33 million from venture capital firms including Greylock. Cuil's privacy policy, unlike that of other search engines, said it did not store users’ search activity or IP addresses.

Cuil launched in July 2008 with an index of 121,617,892,992 web pages. About one month after launch, Cuil's Product VP and search technologist, Louis Monier, quit the company citing disagreements with the CEO, Tom Costello. On December 19, 2008, BusinessWeek listed Cuil as one of the most successful U.S. startups of 2008, based on the amount of money they raised. As of February, 2009, Cuil had 127 billion indexed pages. According to Alexa, the site reached a peak of just over 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02% and ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic. By October 13, 2008, it had dropped to 0.005% and ranked as the 21,960th site in traffic.