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

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#61

Post by rythie »

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?

They can be the long tail of search engines, an army of Google beaters that are used by people that would never consider using Yahoo search.

I don't think the ordering of the results is Google's competitive advantage anymore it's branding and habit.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#62

Post by darwinGod »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #12

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

Speaking of legacy, wonder if there would be interest in Cuil as a apache project... who knows what might arise from its ashes! :)

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#63

Post by yummyfajitas »

guelo wrote: post #21
savrajsingh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hard to beat, but not impossible. As far as auction sites go, NYSE/ARCA was (about 15 years ago) pretty much the only site providing double auctions for stocks. Now there are lots of them - BATS, BSX, assorted darkpools.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#65

Post by mattmcknight »

acabal wrote: post #54
savrajsingh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For the same reason that Craigslist is still king despite its tragic UI. Solving the chicken-and-egg problems of a large, active community and brand-name recognition is orders of magnitude harder than just making a new auction website.

I have a pretty good idea for how to combine both concepts, running auctions using Craigslist, but keep running into the limitations of their API. It's on the shelf right now, but I am thinking I might take another look at it.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#66

Post by Nelson69 »

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…

Does ebay run auctions the exact same way as they did 10 years ago? In some sense, auctions are the same as they were however many thousands of years ago when the idea was invented, today though ebay has branded it and built in some levels of assurance and trust, it's still an auction but they'll help you dispute and resolve issues.

I expect if there is a different way to slice search, google will explore it. Fundamentally, if you're going to beat them then you have to index more, better, faster, and somehow produce better results, then provide a better experience. I'm not saying people shouldn't challenge them but they're good and I think it's an insanely difficult challenge to beat them.

In 10 years, we'll still know of and probably use Google, I don't know if that's true for bing or ddg, or any of the others. Unless we stop searching.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#67

Post by mattmcknight »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #12

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

I think the massive hype they ran prelaunch is a good anti-lesson. They had to do all of their learning in full view.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#68

Post by jaf656s »

will_critchlow wrote: post #55
jaf656s wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite true (well, for most advertisers; I obviously can't speak for you directly). Total return is also important. Especially when you consider that there are non-zero time costs to running advertising on yet another platform. 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 triv…

You make a valid point, but would you not factor that into your ROI calculation?

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#69

Post by lepht »

acabal wrote: post #54
savrajsingh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For the same reason that Craigslist is still king despite its tragic UI. Solving the chicken-and-egg problems of a large, active community and brand-name recognition is orders of magnitude harder than just making a new auction website.

There's certain cases, Amazon is another example, where a user interface violates what traditionally is considered 'good' design and is enhanced because of it.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#70

Post by moultano »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #59
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…

The harder problem IMHO is customer acquisition. Many companies have built (and still have) link graphs of reasonable quality, but they all struggle to gain real customers. 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 straigh…

That's almost certainly the right strategy for you. The people who founded cuil had a solution in look of a problem, in that they came from the search infrastructure teams at Google and wanted to use those skills. It turns out that running a search engine on very few machines isn't much of a competitive advantage, or even having a very large index.

They also got a lot of marking out of their "ex-Googlers take on Google" narrative which probably wouldn't have worked out as well if they were using something like your strategy.

Post reply on HN