Cuil

Cuil was a web search engine, founded by former Google engineers Anna Patterson and Russell Power (formerly known for large-scale web indexing work), that launched publicly on July 28, 2008 with the ambition of challenging Google's dominance in search. Cuil claimed the largest web index of any search engine at the time, around 120 billion pages, and organized results by content with long text entries and thumbnail images rather than a simple ranked list. Despite the ambitious index-size claims and significant venture backing, Cuil suffered from slow response times, frequently irrelevant or incorrect results, and even inappropriate image results alongside legitimate queries — traffic peaked around 0.2% of worldwide web traffic in July 2008 and declined steadily afterward. Cuil shut down its servers on September 17, 2010, reportedly after an acquisition deal fell through in the preceding days; its patents were later sold to Google, and co-founder Anna Patterson returned to work on Google's search engine team.