Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cuil Goes Down for Good

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 93 posts

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#21

Post by guelo »

savrajsingh wrote: post #13
jedwhite wrote: post #9

$33m sounds like a lot to burn through to get to the gut wrenching point of being down to last pennies. But for those saying "no one can take on Google" and "search isn't an interesting space any more", remember Google got told the same things about the incumbents and "the portals" when it started. There is always a better way out there. Someone just hasn't found it yet. Chances are low that Google will still dominat…

Yes, people can, and should, take on Google. At the same time, I happened to be on eBay today and noticed that I've been an eBay member for just over 10 years. Why is it that we haven't found a better way to run auctions online? Most people still list and participate in online auctions almost exactly the same way they did 10 years ago. I do agree that the pace of innovation is increasing, so maybe 10 years starting f…

I think an auction's network effect is harder to beat. Search doesn't have the network effect so Google was able to win just by being the best, to beat google at search now you're going to have to be an order of magnitude "better" and have non copyable tech. Facebook was able to beat Myspace even though they had the network because for personal identity the tone and "coolness" is very important. But for an auction it's all very impersonal the only thing that matters is the size of the network, there's not a lot of opening for a competitor. The only way I can imagine to beat ebay would be with a massive amount of money to just pay people to come over.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#22

Post by wheels »

jimbokun wrote: post #17
moultano wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because cuil was building a search engine from scratch rather than relying on bing's/yahoo's index to do the underlying scoring. Maybe they shouldn't have started from scratch, but they were certainly tackling a much harder problem (maybe not the right one.) I've heard through the grapevine that they were able to index and serve 100 billion documents on 100 machines, which is a pretty impressive technical acco…

"That's because cuil was building a search engine from scratch rather than relying on bing's/yahoo's index to do the underlying scoring." I've heard this in other discussions of DuckDuckGo here, and I don't understand why bing/yahoo allow a potential competitor free access to data that is so important to their search businesses. What's in it for Yahoo/Microsoft? Or is DDG paying for the privilege?

At the moment DDG is effectively a customer, not a competitor. If DDG ever became large enough to show up on Bing's radar (Bing currently has 600x as much traffic), you can bet that the terms would change.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#23

Post by elblanco »

houseabsolute wrote: post #6
TamDenholm wrote: post #2

I'm sorry to say it but they never stood a chance, i'm not sure if a company will ever be able to take on Google in search directly.

There's something bigger that stands out about this whole episode to me. It's not just that they never stood a chance. It's that if they were smart enough to build an even half-way functional engine, they should have been able to see from long before launch how things were going to work out. I'm very interested in whatever organizational or psychological dysfunction lead them to releasing the product at all.

I'm willing to bet that they simply didn't eat their own dog food and use their search on a day-to-day. They couldn't have. The results were so bad as to be unusable.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#27

Post by binomial »

marknutter wrote: post #16
TamDenholm wrote: post #2

I'm sorry to say it but they never stood a chance, i'm not sure if a company will ever be able to take on Google in search directly.

Anybody that filters out the content generators like ehow, ask.com, demandstudios, etc will get an immediate nod from me. Wait.. doesn't DDG Do this? (honestly, I don't know)

According to Gabriel, he filters out spam aggressively. So the answer is probably "yes".

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#29

Post by okiujhyg »

ramchip wrote: post #15
robryan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bing is the default search in IE, it had a significant chunk of the market with Live Search previously and started off with a $100 million dollar advertising blitz. Add to that the number and talent of the employees working on it and you have something no startup could hope to replicate.

The grandparent wasn't talking about startups, though: i'm not sure if a company will ever be able to take on Google in search directly

Why not? Search has a very low barrier to customer switching. If I want to switch to a new search engine that provides better answer than google I only need to change one setting in my browser - it's easier than picking a new desktop color

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#30

Post by known »

moultano wrote: post #14
twidlit wrote: post #7

Strange how an unfunded startup with a single founder (DuckDuckGo) is getting better results than a $30million backed one comprised of a bunch of ex-Googlers.

That's because cuil was building a search engine from scratch rather than relying on bing's/yahoo's index to do the underlying scoring. Maybe they shouldn't have started from scratch, but they were certainly tackling a much harder problem (maybe not the right one.) I've heard through the grapevine that they were able to index and serve 100 billion documents on 100 machines, which is a pretty impressive technical acco…

100 billion documents on 100 machines

I think Cuil should sell their index as a service. Over which businesses can implement PageRank and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagerank#See_also type of algorithms.

Post reply on HN