Cuil didn't die because people were "too lazy to switch to something new." It died because among the few who did know what Cuil was, opinions ranged from "disap

Cuil didn't die because people were "too lazy to switch to something new." It died because among the few who did know what Cuil was, opinions ranged from "disappointment" to "laughingstock". Remember "Cuil theory", in which degrees of disconnection from reality were measured in Cuils? Cuil was ambitious, and that was laudable and did get it some attention. But unfortunately it was nowhere near good enough for the level of hype they built. Many of these "Better than the big guy" products have the same problem, albeit to a lesser degree — they are better by some very specific metric, but that metric isn't the one that most people associate with the product's value. In Cuil's case, relevant and accurate results were what people wanted, but Cuil was worse on those axes than ancient search engines like Mamma.com.