A new report reveals that when the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, invested in Cuil, a search engine, they valued ex-Googlers Anna Patterson, Russell Power, and Louis Monier's startup at a ridiculous $200 million. With Monier leaving, does that mean it's worth 33 percent less? The search engine's sloppy launch has likely proved more damaging to the founders' paper wealth. But Cuil's outsized funding should hearten every Google customer-service rep: The stock may be down, but the value of putting "Google" on your LinkedIn profile remains overinflated. Just tell the investors about the time you beat Larry Page at foosball, and their wallets open right up.

Cuil, the would-be Google killer backed by Wal-Mart family money, has lost one of its highest-profile executives, Louis Monier. Monier, Cuil's VP of product, founded AltaVista and previously worked at eBay and Google. and VP of product Louis Monier just a month after the site's public launch. "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," TechCrunch reports. Cuil had a road map? It must have pointed to a dead end. In August, Hitwise reported Cuil had 0.007 percent of the U.S. search market.

[UPDATE: Sarah Carey wrote to say that her post was removed temporarily because of traffic overload. It's back up now.]

"I am really trying to get off of the PR bandwagon," declares the formerly PR-friendly Robert Scoble. "We write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon," gripes Web 2.0 event regular Sarah Lacy. You see, neither Scoble nor Lacy got one of the secret advance "pre-briefings" from overhyped search engine Cuil prior to the site's launch on Sunday night. So they didn't get to lead the charge of Cuil is kewl! announcements, nor the backwash of Umm, maybe not retractions. Don't dismiss the pair's lengthy posts as sour grapes.Instead, read them aloud: This is the sound of two industry insiders observing the dreary results of the canned, controlled and scheduled "news" crafted by Valley publicists and parroted by self-styled "reporters" whose sole metric of success is pushing the Publish button first. All Lacy and Scoble needed was one morning on the outside. Yes, you two, this is how it looks to your readers every single day.

Sam Pullara, a vice president at Yahoo, has come up with a brilliant strategy: Rip off new search engine Cuil's three-column layout, and substitute in Yahoo's much more relevant search results. A sample test on "Cuil" yields much better information than the would-be Google rival offers. I'm guessing "yuil" is Gaelic for "humiliation."

Hard to believe it's been 37 years since the oversized, photo-driven Look magazine folded. (Bonus trivia: Stanley Kubrick got his start there as a photographer.) Today, I think the guy trying to raise two mil for the look.com domain is aiming too high. The whole world has proven they can learn to spell Google, eBay and Amazon. What do you think a look.com site would be in 2008? It seems perfect for a search engine — hey, isn't look Gaelic for knowledge?

The website for overhyped Google competitor Cuil claims that cuil, which just happens to sound like the English "cool" but I'm sure that never crossed their minds, is a Gaelic word that means "knowledge." I'm not saying they made that up, but I'll feel better when I have a factcheck-quality reference for it. We've been poking around Gaelic dictionaries online, but the only definitions we've turned up are "rear" and "corner." I've emailed the company to ask for a source that would satisfy the typical research editor at a national mag or newspaper. Here's the FAQ version of Cuil's name:

Holy Cory Doctorow! "We do not keep logs of our users' search activity," vows the privacy policy for Cuil, the overrated Google competitor getting way too much press today. Why isn't this their marketing slogan?