Louis Monier Departs Cuil Search Engine

Cuil hasn’t had an easy start to life. First it was born with a silly name. As with many online startups, no one knows how to pronounce it correctly (it’s meant to be pronounced “cool” in case you are wondering). Then came the spectacularly bad launch day. Despite Cuil’s own self-promotion as a would be Google killer, Cuil’s launch resulted in less-than-satisfactory search results, and was widely panned. Despite being initially overwhelmed by traffic, Cuil now seems to have sunk back into relative obscurity.

To add to its woes, Louis Monier, Cuil’s Vice President of Product, has apparently left the company, although he’ll remain on as a “consultant”. Little else has been said on the matter, apart from that there were “philosophical differences in approach and style between Monier and the other management”. Which, spoken in plain English, means Louis and the others just didn’t get along. Which is shame as Monier has quite a pedigree: co-founding and CTO of AltaVista, then moving on to eBay as head of search, before joining Google. Clearly if you’re running a search engine company, Monier’s knowledge would be indispensible.

So hard times for Cuil, they’ve certainly got a long way to go before they can claim to even start encroach on Google’s turf.