Remember Cuil? Yea, the Google competitor. Well, if you do remember them you are cool, if not - no worries, they are offline and you didn't miss much.
TechCrunch broke the story that Cuil went offline and later noted it had to do with a failed acquisition.
New sources tells us that Cuil was in the final stages of an acquisition as of last Wednesday, and everything was in place except the final signatures. Then the deal fell apart for some reason.
There is some discussion around this search engine going offline. We have threads at Google Blogoscoped Forums, Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.
The Search Engine Watch thread has one member saying:
The employees were told at 11 AM today, and the servers shut down at 4 PM PDT.
Did you ever use Cuil? I didn't, except for a few searches when they first launched.
Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums, Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.