Rival, it never did. The launch of the search engine was nothing but a classic PR trainwreck, with much hype and little to show for. Cuil failed to deliver good enough results to drive anyone to change their search behavior, and quickly became the subject of backlash and criticism because of their poor performance and indexing methods that actually took websites down in the process. Last time we reported about Cuil, was when their VP of Products (and AltaVista founder) Louis Monier quietly resigned from the startup.

With the end of the year approaching, I took a peek at how they’re doing traffic-wise out of sheer curiosity. After all, with no less than $33 million in funding and a founding management team consisting of ex-Google search experts, something had to give, right?

Well, no. Cuil isn’t performing well any way you look at it, and I can only imagine how nervous the startup’s management team and investors must be by now. Based on the numbers and graphs we gather from Google Trends, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast, you could even say search engine traffic is nearing rock bottom. Apart from that, a Cuil search for ‘TechCrunch’ still displays a Gmail logo rather than our own.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Launching a startup ain’t easy. And flatlining right after your launch is more of a rite of passage than an embarrassment. Here’s hoping Cuil is cool again by morning.

Update: Yay! It’s back.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The super-stealth search project was founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello (CEO) and Anna Patterson (VP Engineering) were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are also ex-Google employees, and the company has been the subject of intense speculation over the last couple of years.

Much of the secret sauce of Cuil is in the way they index the web and handle actual queries by users. Both are costly to scale, and Cuil claims to have found a way to massively reduce those costs. That allows them to run the search engine a lot cheaper, even at Google-scale should it ever reach that point. By some estimates, Google spends a billion dollars a year to run the back end infrastructure of it’s search business.

Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites. They do not simply catalog keywords on a site and then rank the site based on its importance. They also work to understand how words are related (France – cheese – wine, for example), to return more relevant results to users. This is a semantic approach to search, but very different from Powerset’s natural language approach. Powerset uses artificial intelligence to try to understand what sentences on a website actually mean. Cuil, by comparison, simply tries to properly categorize and file a web page, even if the category name doesn’t appear on the site.

That means users search the same way they always have, but Cuil will try to return better results via refinements in a “explore by category” module to the right of results. A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for “water dogs,” “crossbreed,” “cocker spaniel,” etc. Some of these related terms do not include the term “dog.”

Cuil is experimenting with a new type of search interface as well. Results are shown in three columns and contain an image and more summary text than existing search engines. In addition to refinement by category, Cuil will recommend related searches via tabs across the top of search results. A search for New York, for example, also has tabbed results for recommended refinements like New York Times, New York City, New York Yankees, etc.:

Cuil also says that they will put user privacy at the top of their business objectives. User IP addresses are not recorded to their servers, they say, and cookies are not used to associate a computer with queries. The data is simply dumped as it is created. That means user data cannot be turned over to others, whether its via blind stupidity or lawsuits.

Cuil has raised $33 million over two rounds of financing from Greylock, Madrone Capital Partners and Tugboat Ventures.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The company raised $3 million in equity at a $23 million post-money valuation. All previous investors participated, and new investors Marc Andreessen, SoftTech VC and Western Technology Investment also invested. They simultaneously closed a $1 million lease line with Western Technology Investment for server leases.

We don’t know much yet about Blekko, which was founded by former Topix founder/CEO Rich Skrenta. The company says they won’t be launching anything to the public until 2009. See our original post on Blekko for more background information.

See our coverage of Cuill as well, another hot stealth search startup we’re tracking.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Cuill, a stealth search engine company we first covered in September, has raised $25M in a Series B round led by Madrone Capital Partners and joined by Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners.

Not a whole lot is known about Cuill except that it apparently can index the web at 1/10th the cost of Google. The startup was founded by search experts, two of which came from Google. It has been rumored that Google itself has looked at acquiring Cuill even before it launches.

We previously heard from sources that Cuill had raised $4M in a Series A round from Greylock Partners. That wasn’t exactly true – it had raised $8M from both Greylock and Tugboat. That raises Cuill’s total to at least $33M, with another $5M maybe from self-funding.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

An early version of the search engine, which was demo’d to me yesterday at their offices, has been available to some users of their Powerlabs site. But for the most part, it’s been kept very quiet.

The early version of the service will serve as a showcase for the user interface and engine itself, but it will not have a full web index behind it. For now, Powerset will query only Wikipedia and Freebase. But when I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search.

I’ll temper that statement since the company is not putting anything more than a tiny index of two sites behind the service for now. In particular, the fact that Powerset doesn’t have to bother with spam control and other relevance issues (which is what made Google so great when it launched), means it can’t yet be considered any kind of challenger in the search space. But anyone who uses it will be able to see the potential value of the engine when it is placed in front of a full web index.

For now the company is keeping specific features of the engine confidential, but I can say it has evolved significantly since a screen shot was released in mid-2007.

In preparation for the launch, some of the Powerset team have vowed not to shave until the product is released. They are chronicling their facial hair adventure on a site called Powerstache, which has been covered by Jessica Guynn at the LA Times.

Rumors have also been swirling around the company in general. A number of sources have said that Powerset is pitching for additional capital. And the company also appears to have put plans to hire a new CEO on hold – founder Barney Pell is still firmly in charge at the company.

Powerset is one of three new search engines that we’re keeping a close eye on. The other two, Cuill (pronounced “cool”) and Blekko, are still deep in stealth mode.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Skrenta left Topix last June. He started his new company, Blekko, almost immediately, along with five others from the Topix core team. They raised $2 million in seed funding in September from Baseline Ventures, two early Googlers (David DesJardins and Jeremy Wenokur), and the founding team.

The company is still deep in stealth and, apparently, working out of a garage in true startup style (see image below). The Blekko website, which today has nothing on it except a picture of a puppet created by Skrenta’s daughter, isn’t even close to having a landing page up, let alone the final product. But eventually Skrenta says they’ll launch a full scale search engine to compete with the big guys.

Skrenta, who’s very media savvy, won’t say much about how he’s going to tackle search (he’s not a fan of PageRank though:“PageRank wrecked the web. Google is the cause of all of this. and Google is going down with it.”). He says they are looking at improvements on the back end (indexing and query serving) as well as the user search experience itself. Beyond that, he says we have to wait. And it might be a long wait at that. The company, Skrenta says, may not have a public prototype available until 2009.

Normally an entrepreneur announcing they’re taking on Google with a six person team and just $2 million in funding would either be laughed at or ignored. In Skrenta’s case, he has proven himself more than once as capable of taking on big challenges and winning. This will be a company to watch, and speculate on, in 2008.

There are other promising search startups out there. Powerset, Cuill (we’ll be hearing more about them soon) and the upcoming Wikia Search Engine are all yet to launch. Mahalo is growing fast (but still tiny). Can anyone unseat Google? Perhaps not any time soon. But you don’t have to get much market share to be a huge winner in this space – every 1%, they say, is worth a cool billion dollars.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Cuill, which was founded by husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, can supposedly index web pages at 1/10th the cost of Google (a significant competitive advantage) and has claims of relevance improvements over existing search engines. Patterson was until recently the architect of Google’s TeraGoogle, and the team also brought on Russell Power from TeraGoogle as well. The rumor is that they’ve continued to hire senior search experts away from Google, beyond the people listed on the site.

Greylock is behind some of the biggest success stories of the new Internet, including Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and others. Most of those investments are led by David Sze, however. Strohm only rarely seems to invest in the consumer sector.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The company’s main claim is that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google can – Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuill is the polar opposite of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page. Powerset’s indexing costs, therefore, should be much higher per web page than Google’s.

Cuill was also founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts, and Google must be fuming that their inventions were not added to Google’s intellectual property library. Costello was the founder of Xift.

Cuill met with venture capitalists, but we’re hearing that Costello and Patterson eventually self-funded the company with a $5ish million injection of capital. They now have 10-15 employees and offices in Menlo Park.

Another rumor circulating is that Google already took a shot at acquiring the company with a very healthy offer, showing that they take this potential threat seriously. And the company may have enticed at least one other senior search scientist from Google to join them recently.

Cuill is supposedly set to launch some time in 2008, although they very well might be acquired well before the public gets to see what they are up to.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.