Rarely is the bubble of ultra-hype pierced by the darts of reality so quickly. Former Google employees launched Cuil on July 28 as a Google killer, promising that their new search engine would revolutionize the genre by indexing more Web pages than any competitor's. Thanks to massive press coverage, Cuil's traffic cooked for a couple days after going live, but whispers about irrelevant search results quickly became a roar. Cuil's indexing robot came under fire from Web site owners and search technologist Louis Monier quit a month after launch due to a dust-up with CEO Tom Costello. According to Alexa.com, Cuil's traffic dropped from 0.2 percent of the worldwide total in late July to 0.01 percent, or 9,73521th in the world in late November, during which time Google enjoyed 28.07 percent of global Web traffic for 2nd place behind Yahoo. Cuil's name is derived from the mythological Fionn mac Cumhaill, an Irish hero who is also known primarily for fish tales.
