Louis Monier leaves Cuil

Cuil has barely launched, and they're already airing out some dirty laundry.  Louis Monier,  their VP of Product, is departing (he is no longer on their About page). 

TechCrunch reported that he and CEO Tom Costello had different ideas about the product road map;  one would have hoped they were on the same page, given they had similar backgrounds, and that Monier was barely a year old at Cuil. 

Monier is considered one of the leading authorities on Search, having worked at Google, eBay for search, and of course having co-founded AltaVista.  So this is a blow.

Forget the botched launch.  I think Cuil has a lot of potential... potential it is not easy to see currently, since whats visible is their lack of relevancy in their search results.  But getting relevant search results takes a long time and lots of money (Kosmix knows!).  What Cuil's main claim is to index faster and cheaper than the mother-ship, Google (see the number of web pages they claim to have indexed, below their search bar, below).  And if that is true, then it has a huge amount of value.... and can potentially be the right piece of the puzzle for Microsoft to bring out the best from its acquisition of PowerSet. 

Cuil also has $33 MM in funding, so hopefully are set for a while (their last round of $25 MM was around April of 2008).  I don't know how much of their money is left, but I would guess that with ~30 employees (per Crunchbase) and being in the Search space, they're probably burning about $700K/month.  So they can weather this storm.