41–50 of 93 posts
I 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
I 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
But would you be targeting an sector as attractive to the investors as Google? The investors weren't worrying about the making "just anything" useful or profitable. They wanted Google profits and Google uses.
Besides, sow do you know what where the investors willing? AFAIK, investors are normally willing to invest one hundred now and get one thousand several years later. In other words, investing 33M to get 330M 5 or 10 years later.
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
(Apologies for the off-topic comment; new ideas are exciting!)
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/08/api_updates...
"We are exploring a potential fee-based structure as well as ad-revenue models that will enable BOSS developers to monetize their offerings. When we roll out these changes, BOSS will no longer be a free service to developers."
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…
How many queries per second can they handle on those nodes, and with what latency? What kind of relevancy calculations were they able to do at query-time in their system with 1B documents per node? Were they able to support query-time aggregation of structured fields in their documents? Was the index stale or did they support continuous feeding and indexing of new documents? If the latter, how well did they meet their SLA QPS and latency when indexing new documents?
I can set up a single search node and fill it up with God know how many documents any day, but the difference between supporting 10 QPS with ~500ms latency and 3000 QPS with the 99 percentile below 40ms is really more interesting than exactly how many documents I have per node.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But would you be targeting an sector as attractive to the investors as Google? The investors weren't worrying about the making "just anything" useful or profitable. They wanted Google profits and Google uses.
do you wonder whether I claim to be able to set unrealistic targets and reach them, if so the answer is no. Besides, sow do you know what where the investors willing? AFAIK, investors are normally willing to invest one hundred now and get one thousand several years later. In other words, investing 33M to get 330M 5 or 10 years later.
Not quite. VC plans on 9 out of 10 deals not working out. So that remaining 1 in 10 has to make enough to pay for the rest. That means that a 10-fold return just breaks even. But it gets worse. For an investment with a 10 year horizon they need to beat alternate investments. If you peg those at 10%/year (compounding annually), then you now need a 25-fold potential return on investment for the fund to have a chance to meet its goals.
Earlier 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
Problems there would be a) to beat Microsoft and Google at that game, and b) it would turn search into a low-margin commodity. Both make it hare to turn a profit.
$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…
The main thing it was going to do differently, was instead of having a fixed ending time for an auction, it would be conducted like a regular auction - in real time, via AJAX, and the auction ends once no one else bids.
Seemed like that realtime element, along with no 'sniping', fairer bidding, a cool UI etc would be a good reason for people to switch.
But the network effect is massive. To be successful as an ebay competitor, I think you'd need a pretty large marketing budget, or several people working on promotion full time.
It's ripe for the picking though. And massive profits.
Does 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.)