The only lasting legacy of Cuil may be its use in expressing orders of abstraction away from normalcy: http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory
Cuil theory reminds me of the pataphor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pataphor#.27Pataphor
Cuil Goes Down for Good
31–40 of 93 posts
Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good
#32Does this leave Blekko as the last standing independent Google-killer? (DDG doesn't count to me because yegg isn't (yet) indexing the web himself.)
Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good
#33Earlier 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." 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.
As far as I know, DDG isn't paying for access. But I might be wrong about that. Maybe they are they paying for Bing, but not Yahoo?
Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Once again, you are not the customer, you are the product. Search engine customers (advertisers) gravitate to the largest player because it provides a larger inventory of users/searches to select from. Search advertising is a winner-takes-all market and it would take a huge shift in inventory to change this momentum. Once it starts shifting it is hard to stop and the changing economic factors make it easier for the insurgent to capitalize on whatever mis-steps the incumbent made, but there is a lot of inertia to overcome to get this ball rolling.
A far more likely scenario for a major change in this sector would be for social search to eclipse the crawl it and rank it model that is currently dominant.
Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good
#35Strange 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.
IMHO DDG's success stems from the fact that yegg listens to the users, is small yet big, and addresses a niche market - the one that demands quality results and settles for nothing less. By being small DDG can address issues that others will not even think or bother thinking about i.e. enhanced privacy controls, TOR utilization etc. I believe that Cull was a dream that went south. Unfortunately that dream had a hefty…
"IMHO DDG's success stems from the fact that yegg listens to the users"
I once contacted Cuil about some worthless search results, and got a standard reply asking me to be patient since they were a small company. But there wasn't any hint in the email that they would actually address the issue, so drastically reduced my use of them and never bothered to contact them again. Listening to users would have probably helped if my experience indicates a pattern.
Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good
#36I am certainly sure that If I was given 10% of cuil 33M I would have end up with something 10 times more useful and profitable
Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good
#37I'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)
Forgot where I read it (here?) but he actively removes (dis)content mills.
Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good
#38But ... but ... if it goes down, how will it ever kill Google? =:-o
That was totally worth the downvote.
Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Forgot where I read it (here?) but he actively removes (dis)content mills.
yeah, there was a post about it here a bit ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549690
Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Once again, you are not the customer, you are the product. Search engine customers (advertisers) gravitate to the largest player because it provides a larger inventory of users/searches to select from. Search advertising is a winner-takes-all market and it would take a huge shift in inventory to change this momentum. Once it starts shifting it is hard to stop and the changing economic factors make it easier for the i…
As an advertiser, I don't care how many people are using one search engine over another, as long as it is non-zero. I care about the ROI I get and spend accordingly.