Stick a fork in it. The oft-maligned Web search service started up by some ex-Googlers is currently offline, and reports indicate that Cuil might be gone for good. That's not a moment too soon for PCMag's John C. Dvorak, who labeled the search service as, "cheap, misleading PR," "buggy," "slow," and ultimately, "pathetic" during its 2008 launch.

According to TechCrunch, Cuil employees allegedly haven't been paid this week and are starting to look for new jobs—which would indicate that the company is on the outs, as opposed to Cuil's primary server merely being offline for whatever reason.

Although Cuil initially launched with a site repository nearly three times that of rival Google—more than 120 billion web pages indexed in all—the search service was lambasted by its users for delivering less-than-accurate results for common queries. Not only did Cuil deliver a poor showing when trying to find normal information, but the site couldn't even accurately deliver information when searching for Cuil itself--an auspicious sign for a, "Google-Killer" search engine.

According to a quick dash of metrics by Compete, Cuil never quite pushed past 200,000 monthly unique visitors at any point in the past year, which itself makes the company's initial $200 million pre-launch valuation even more head-scratching. Although Cuil boasted strong post-launch user metrics, visitors to the site rapidly began to deteriorate within the first month of the service's existence.

In an effort to possibly staunch the loss, Cuil launched a new service in 2010—Cpedia—that attempted to automatically generate full articles instead of search results for a given topic. "We find everything on the Web about your topic, remove all the duplication and put the information on one page," read one of the site's feature pages.

When users like Paul Kafasis of One Foot Tsunami began to dub the service as, "the rantings of a crazed computer," Cuil CEO Tom Costello took the airwaves to defend Cuil's latest endeavor.

"I'm sorry if people were expecting Skynet. I can understand how it would be upsetting to get psyched up for life, the universe and everything, only to get a different UI on a search engine," he said.

Nevertheless, even Cuil's attempt to expand beyond search wasn't enough to keep the lights on. According to a post in the SearchEngineWatch forums, employees were told about Cuil's demise around 11 a.m. Friday, and the servers were taken offline five hours later.