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Cuil Goes Down for Good

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Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#71

Post by will_critchlow »

jaf656s wrote: post #68
will_critchlow wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, in theory. In practice it can be very hard to include switching costs, complexity costs etc into the equation. Most business people I know take a much more pragmatic view of calculating ROI on direct costs and putting a finger in the air about whether it's worthwhile.

Also, if total return is small and capped, it may not even be worth the time to calculate ROI.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#72

Post by jbm »

btilly wrote: post #47
tzury wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK, investors are normally willing to invest one hundred now and get one thousand several 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 (compound…

... Why was this modded down?

Is the reasoning wrong, or is there some troll going on that I don't know about? It seems quite realistic to me.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#73

Post by ntoshev »

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…

I don't use Yahoo/Bing straight up, e.g. I re-rank, omit, etc.

All re-ranking you can do is very limited with these services because they are black boxes: you don't see what factors went into ranking a page the way it happened, you can't tweak the weight of different factors, you can't add new factors. All you can have is hardcoded rules like "if there is a wikipedia page in the first 20 results, bring it on top" that don't really add much value, because if that wikipedia page is any good it would be on top already. With spam results it's similar: you can provide impressive customer service blacklisting spam on user requests, but major search engines are already pretty good in low-ranking spam so much that you don't see it if there are any other meaningful results.

Your marketing here on HN has been brilliant, you have some very interesting UI decisions and possibilities that Google doesn't have, but your added value is definitely not in improved ranking of results.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#74

Post by kragen »

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)

I find EHow results useful from time to time. Isn't ask.com another search engine? I don't know about demandstudios because I don't know what their domain names are.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#75

Post by CPops »

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.

Craigslist's UI is fantastic.

It's not pretty, but that's about the least important element of web-design.

It's very easy for people to understand how things are organized. Cities are organized together, categories are organized together. All of the pages are text-based so pages load fast. Various functions on the page are explained with helpful text explaining what's going on when you try and post or respond to a post. Etc.

Their UI can be improved with a little more padding in places and a little more focus on quality typography, but it's remarkable that such a large site has maintained such a quality design in the face of enormous pressure to change.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#77

Post by epi0Bauqu »

ntoshev wrote: post #73
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't use Yahoo/Bing straight up, e.g. I re-rank, omit, etc. All re-ranking you can do is very limited with these services because they are black boxes: you don't see what factors went into ranking a page the way it happened, you can't tweak the weight of different factors, you can't add new factors. All you can have is hardcoded rules like "if there is a wikipedia page in the first 20 results, bring it on top" tha…

Thx. I can't reveal too much here, but I do a lot more in the reranking area such that the top 20 will look very different for many queries when compared. I think these improvements go a long way to improving search UX, but ranking is subtle and so doesn't get noticed much (except when failing miserably).

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#78

Post by EdiX »

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.

the lore is: they had serious technical problems the day before the launch day and decided to pull through anyways. The load on the already faulty system caused additional failures bringing the cuil's quality to it's lowest point, and that's where the most people saw it.

Re: Cuil Goes Down for Good

#80

Post by EdiX »

kragen wrote: post #74
marknutter wrote: post #16

Earlier 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)

I find EHow results useful from time to time. Isn't ask.com another search engine? I don't know about demandstudios because I don't know what their domain names are.

> Isn't ask.com another search engine

In a way they still are but they also to a lot of ehow type SEO.

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