September 12th, 2008

Cuil exec bails out of search engine.

Posted by Sam Diaz @ 4:30 am

Categories: General, Google

Tags: Google Inc., Search Engine, Search, Sam Diaz

TechCrunch has confirmed that a key VP at Cuil, the alternative search engine that debuted this past summer to poor reviews, has resigned from the company but will stay on as a consultant. The VP of product, Louis Monier, apparently resigned last week over disagreements with other people on the management team. According to Techcrunch:

This is a big blow to the troubled search engine - Monier was recruited away from Google a year ago, where he was working on advanced search products. Prior to Google he was the head of search at eBay and was the cofounder and CTO of AltaVista. He is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of Internet search according to search experts Danny Sullivan, John Battelle and others.

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) was hyped to be a “Google killer” but early tests had it failing miserably when compared to Google. In a video segment this summer, I said that Cuil’s launch was premature and that the search engine needed more work before it could even begin to dent Google.