Launched back in July Cuil.com, the search engine developed and managed by former Google employees born with the specific aim to contrast the Google dominance in the search engine market, is now hitting a record low in traffic.

The company made news last summer when, during its launch press release, stated it owned the most comprehensive Web index in existance, much larger than Google's — 125 billion against the roughly 10 billion pages indexed on the Google servers.

The Mountain View, California-based search giant used to state the number of indexed pages in its homepage, next to the search box, but then suddenly opted not to make that number public anymore, stressing that the exact number of pages isn't quite as important as the refinement of the search algorithm in use. At that time, the index included a number of pages in excess of 8 billion.

Cuil is also notable for the radical approach it takes to private data: while its competitors Google, Microsoft and Yahoo currently hold the personal user information (search data and user IP) for three to eighteen months in order to improve the user experience, the Cuil search engine doesn't store such information at all in its servers.

Moreover, the company claims it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google and has told their potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google's, thanks on its innovative search architecture.

Cuil received very extensive press coverage on its launch date, and was considered capable of potentially rivaling with Google. However, the engine soon showed its limits in terms of both poor relevance of its results and slow response time of the site, part of which has to be attributed to the large index and the fact that almost all search results come with a picture.

Other common criticism include a very poor indexing

method that, in some cases, would even temporarely take down the websites it was trying to visit with its spiders, prompting webmasters to label Cuil's indexing algorithm "ameteurish". Moreover, a month after its launch, the company's Product VP and search technologist, Louis Monier, quit Cuil citing disagreements with the CEO Tom Costello.

Because of all these issues, the new and very promising search engine has now lost most of its initial momentum, and it is now clear that the company doesn't pose a threat to Google or any of the other major search engines. According to Alexa, the site reached a peak of just over 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02% and ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic. By October 13, 2008, it had dropped to 0.005% and ranked as the 21,960th site in traffic, further and further away from its main competitors.

Many analysts have ended up agreeing with Google that the mere number of indexed pages isn't enough to make a search engine competitive: much of the Web's contents are in fact redundant, which means that, in some cases, less can be better.

There is a general agreement that the real breakthrough that made Google so unique and popular lays instead in its algorithms, particularly in the Pagerank which, as many webmasters know, expresses the probability of a random surfer coming across a certain site or web page. The pagerank algorithm was first developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while the two were students at Stanford, and uses a concept very similar to the one used by journals to establish the authority of a paper based on the number of other papers citing it.

According to ComScore, Google is slowly but constantly gaining market share in its direct competitors Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask.com, continuing a trend that started with the inauguration of the company and never saw a decline in its market share ever since.