According to NetApplications' market share tracker, Cuil's slice of the market has dwindled to .01 percent, down from a high of .26 percent reached soon after its launch.
When Cuil — pronounced "cool" — launched back in July, it hit the market with $33 million in venture capital and a starting index of 120 billion web pages. The company also boasts three former Google staff members among its top ranks, including VP of Engineering Anna Patterson, co-founder Russell Power and Vice President of Product Louis Monier.
But soon after its launch, problems started to emerge. The chief complaint levied at Cuil was that despite the size of its index, the engine itself simply didn't return results that were as accurate or useful as Google's.
Tech writer Davey Winder of ITPro.co.uk, not wanting to put too fine a point on anything, called Cuil's results "a big steaming pile of crap."
"I put [Cuil] to a real world test after launch, going head to head against Google across a number of really very simple and very real world searches. The results were not just disappointing, they were devastating as far as Cuil was concerned," he said.
Winder conducted several tests for the tech blog DaniWeb that compared results from Cuil and Google.
For example, Winder entered the seach term "Mojave" into both Google and Cuil. He chose this term for its trickiness — Microsoft had recently conducted a high-profile test that was code-named "Mojave" and Winder wanted to see if the search engines would pick up on the storm of online talk about it.
Google did. Cuil did not.
Winder also conducted tests based on more specific search terms with similarly disappointing results for Cuil and strong results for Google.
Cuil remains available at Cuil.com.