Hands up who remembers Cuil. Cuil was the search engine launched some time ago amid a hail of boasts to how it would topple the mighty Google. As with many other search engines before it, it was hailed a ‘Google Killer’.
Like every other search engine before it, and since, it failed to make even the slightest of dents in Google’s market share. Now it appears that Cuil is going to Google, cap in hand, looking for money.
Tom Costello is the chief executive of Cuil. He stated that Cuil was looking at asking Yahoo and Google to advertise on their site.
That is what we are going to do. We are negotiating with the obvious people, Google and Yahoo, and we are going to decide which is going to be the better fit.
When Cuil launched it claimed it would have 120 billion pages in its index, three times as many as other search engines. Cuil received $33 million in venture capital funding to launch, but now needs to earn money itself, and rather than compete for advertising with Yahoo and Google, Cuil wants to use them.
Costello added:
We have had no ads until now because we are building traffic. You don’t want to put up ads unless you have enough traffic.
Cuil doesn’t have the traffic to sell averts itself, so is now hoping Google or Yahoo will do it for them.
