Not sure why
Not sure why Google would want patents that supply poor results when they're doing a good job of that by themselves...
Patents for a crappy, short-lived muffin-, strawberry- and porn-fuelled search engine created by three ex-Googlers have been scooped up by the Chocolate Factory. Cuil, which was pronounced "Cool" and was labelled as a GOOGLE KILLER – but in fact proved to be neither of those things – plonked itself on the interwebs in July …
RTFLA, the patents aren't about search methods but about search user interface.
"These pending patents tend to focus primarily upon search interfaces, such as how multiple tabs might be presented for query terms that might have different senses of meanings, different types of dropdowns from those to show finer levels of granularity of associated categories, and the ability to drill down and refine queries based upon related aspects"
Cuil seemed to get most of the bugs out of the software some time before they ran out of money. I switched to it as default search engine for about six weeks until it stopped and they had some interesting stuff under development. Much more so than all the "identity traders" have managed to come up with in the last 18 months or so.