51–60 of 93 posts
Hunch + Quora + Facebook questions could well be the biggest threat to Google's quasi-monopoly.
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?
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…
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.
$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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Would you rather make $ 1 from a $.1 investment or $ 10 k from a $ 2k investment (assuming the former isn't scalable because there are no more users to advertise to)? If there is a non trivial time cost in setting up management, billing etc, you might not even bother with the former.
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
The investors paid for the full probabilistic model, where in 10% of the cases Cuil would have succeeded in beating Google and would have made tens of billions of dollars. That alone is worth 10% * tens of billions = billions. 33M for that doesn't seem much in that perspective.
Your statement about "I am certainly sure" and "10 times more" ignores the probability distribution of your potential success, and how big is your success in each one of the cases.
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…
Technical achievements are great; but Gabriel is much better placed. He is self funded, he is building on existing tools (always good advice), he leveraged us, the hacker crowd, who can be very loyal, he clearly listens to his customers etc.
Cuil, on the other hand, produced some very confusing (if technically interesting) things and then ranted about those who criticised them. They had a lot of big bucks VC money (always a warning sign) and didn't appear to be leveraging loyalty from any user base.
Even if the problems these two startups are facing are different; there is a lesson here. One is how not to build a product, and one is :)
$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…
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…
I started out before those APIs existed, and did all my own crawling & indexing. When they came out, I decided to focus on my value-adds because I thought that was a quicker path to customer acquisition.
Furthermore, I don't use Yahoo/Bing straight up, e.g. I re-rank, omit, etc. I also mix them with my own my index/negative spam index from my own crawling efforts.
Would love to learn from from Cuil 's cuil code :)