This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here

Do you remember last year, when a startup named Cuil that was founded by two ex-Googlers made huge noise when it launched its search engine with the claim of having the largest search index in the world? The result was a huge initial traffic spike . But when it didn’t “beat Google,” its traffic dropped like a whale being thrown out of an airplane.