

Ask: what do all of you think of Cuill (and other search startups)? - henning
http://www.cuill.com/founders.html
I'm skeptical of anyone who tries to play in the same ballpark as Google, but it looks like Cuill is composed of a fair number of ex-Googlers and others who are smartypants.<p>Anyone know anything about Cuill and what they do that a Google search wouldn't turn up?
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henning
Cuill seems noteworthy in that two of the founders are ex-Googlers and all of
them seem very smart. "Cuill is a stealth search engine startup which claims
that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google.
Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of
Google's, based on new search architectures and relevance methods."

I can't find anything that indicates whether there's any substance to their
claims. Certainly very smart people can do interesting work whose significance
they greatly embellish and overestimate (AI researchers in the 70s and 80s).

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rms
The logical argument against that seems to be that indexing costs aren't
Google's major problem and cheaper indexing wouldn't provide much of a
competitive advantage.

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chadboyda
Exactly, reducing the indexing cost has little to no impact on the customers,
so there is no competitive advantage to using Cuill over Google for searchers.
They claim more "relevancy" but there is nothing to support that claim so far,
but I'm eagerly awaiting it.

Even better relevancy may not be enough as most people believe current search
technology is "good enough". It would have to be very innovative. If nothing
else, they're a good acquisition target for an existing search company looking
to further reduce costs and increase profits or allocate more resources
towards more computationally expensive algorithms (spam filtering, semantics,
content targeting, etc.)

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wmeredith
Ah, but they did say they can do it faster. If they can survive long enough to
catch up and pass Google or Yahoo in terms of sheer numbers of pages indexed,
they may have something.

I think if they can index significantly faster, then it's highly likely
they'll be bought up by Google or the competition for their indexing tech
before anything in mentioned in that first paragraph happens.

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chadboyda
Faster? Interesting! I hadn't heard that before. Personally I'm rooting for
them, I would love to see some innovation in the search market. Unfortunately
I just don't see the consumer benefiting directly much from any of this. I
hope they prove me wrong.

