Louis Monier, Cuil’s VP Product, quietly resigned from the newly launched search engine last week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. This is a big blow to the troubled search engine - Monier was recruited away from Google a year ago, where he was working on advanced search products. Prior to Google he was the head of search at eBay and was the cofounder and CTO of AltaVista. He is widely considered to be on of the founding fathers of Internet search according to search experts Danny Sullivan, John Battelle and others. Why did Monier leave? We’ve heard but haven’t confirmed that he and CEO Tom Costello just couldn’t agree on the Cuil product road map, and that the botched launch didn’t help things much either. Monier won’t return our calls, and we have an email in to Cuil for comment. So far Cuil doesn’t seem to have a lot of stickiness with users. Tons of traffic at launch, but it spiked right back down immediately afterwards (Google Trends, Compete, Quantcast). Update: Vince Sollitto, Cuil VP Communications, confirms Monier’s departure and says he will remain on board as a consultant, continuing to contribute and advise the company. “I’m told by Louis that he believes strongly in the goals and potential of the company, especially its technology,” Sollitto said, adding �%
Marred by page errors and intermittant outages when it launched on Monday, a new search engine billing itself as a wider-reaching, more intuitive Google may have trouble competing with established Silicon Valley search goliaths, analysts said. 
