
Google buys what’s left of defunct search startup Cuil - zoowar
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/20/google-buys-cuil-patents/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29
======
boyter
I know Cuil is the poster-boy of how to suck at launch but it really is a pity
they didn't succeed. With Bing powering Yahoo there are really only 4 players
in the English language index space, Google, Bing, Gigablast and Blekko. Add
in the non English ones Yandex and Baidu and there really is a lack of
companies to compete with.

Its because of this I want DuckDuckGo or another company to eventually do its
own deep indexing to avoid the very singular view of the web we are presented
with.

~~~
bobds
<http://commoncrawl.org/>

Common Crawl is a non-profit that maintains a big crawl dataset.

~~~
boyter
That's only the first portion of the problem, and in my opinion not the most
difficult. Anyone can write a web crawler since its essentially,

while(links) { get(link) }

With a little xargs or parallel magic + wget you can suck down billions of
pages with little effort.

There is more to it then that to keep things fresh but its not that hard to
just kick it off now and then. The thing that's difficult is taking that data
and turning it into an index able to span multiple machines.

If it was that easy DuckDuckGo or someone else would have taken that data and
done something with it by now.

------
officemonkey
I haven't though about Cuil since reddit used the term as a measure of
randomness. <http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory>

~~~
Omni5cience
Me either, if you're not familiar with it this part is worth reading:

One Cuil = One level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation.

Example: You ask me for a Hamburger.

1 Cuil: if you asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.

2 Cuils: If you asked me for a hamburger, but it turns out I don't really
exist. Where I was originally standing, a picture of a hamburger rests on the
ground.

3 Cuils: You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special
sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.

4 Cuils: Why are we speaking German? A mime cries softly as he cradles a young
cow. Your grandfather stares at you as the cow falls apart into patties. You
look down only to see me with pickles for eyes, I am singing the song that
gives birth to the universe.

5 Cuils: You ask for a hamburger, I give you a hamburger. You raise it to your
lips and take a bite. Your eye twitches involuntarily. Across the street a
father of three falls down the stairs. You swallow and look down at the
hamburger in your hands. I give you a hamburger. You swallow and look down at
the hamburger in your hands. You cannot swallow. There are children at the top
of the stairs. A pickle shifts uneasily under the bun. I give you a hamburger.
You look at my face, and I am pleading with you. The children are crying now.
You raise the hamburger to your lips, tears stream down your face as you take
a bite. I give you a hamburger. You are on your knees. You plead with me to go
across the street. I hear only children's laughter. I give you a hamburger.
You are screaming as you fall down the stairs. I am your child. You cannot see
anything. You take a bite of the hamburger. The concrete rushes up to meet
you. You awake with a start in your own bed. Your eye twitches involuntarily.
I give you a hamburger. As you kill me, I do not make a sound. I give you a
hamburger.

6 Cuils: You ask me for a hamburger. My attempt to reciprocate is cut brutally
short as my body experiences a sudden lack of electrons. Across a variety of
hidden dimensions you are dismayed. John Lennon hands me an apple, but it
slips through my fingers. I am reborn as an ocelot. You disapprove. A crack
echoes through the universe in defiance of conventional physics as
cosmological background noise shifts from randomness to a perfect A Flat.
Children everywhere stop what they are doing and hum along in perfect pitch
with the background radiation. Birds fall from the sky as the sun engulfs the
earth. You hesitate momentarily before allowing yourself to assume the locus
of all knowledge. Entropy crumbles as you peruse the information contained
within the universe. A small library in Phoenix ceases to exist. You stumble
under the weight of everythingness, Your mouth opens up to cry out, and
collapses around your body before blinking you out of the spatial plane. You
exist only within the fourth dimension. The fountainhead of all knowledge
rolls along the ground and collides with a small dog. My head tastes sideways
as spacetime is reestablished, you blink back into the corporeal world
disoriented, only for me to hand you a hamburger as my body collapses under
the strain of reconstitution. The universe has reasserted itself. A particular
small dog is fed steak for the rest of its natural life. You die in a freak
accident moments later, and you soul works at the returns desk for the Phoenix
library. You disapprove. Your disapproval sends ripples through the inter-
dimensional void between life and death. A small child begins to cry as he
walks toward the stairway where his father stands.

~~~
yogrish
Looks like Some "Inception" thing going on here...pretty interesting though.

------
mikeklaas
My schadenfreude gland really needs to know the purchase price.

------
njharman
> a once-promising search startup

Really, I never thought so. I remember them being DOA.

------
untog
Cuil seems like a case study in launching too soon. There was nothing wrong
with their offering, as such, but they launched before it was ready and paid
the price. Shame.

~~~
bootload
_"... There was nothing wrong with their offering ..."_

except it didn't work ~ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2710119638/> a
quick search for common words I knew of revealed little ~
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/cuil/> and the HN verdict at the
time ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258737>

~~~
untog
"Offering" was probably the wrong word. What I meant was that there was
nothing wrong with what they were trying to do, but that they launched too
soon, and not working is part of that rather than an intrinsic flaw in their
mission.

~~~
bootload
_"... there was nothing wrong with what they were trying to do ..."_

you're right, as an earlier post suggests it was half-baked & released much
too early. How much of the web surface has google indexed compared to what is
there?

~~~
EdiX
Once someone who worked at cuil told me their index got corrupted the day
before launch was scheduled.

------
danohuiginn
So Google have bought up a bunch of patents for search UI. Presumably Google
won't use any themselves -- they're just storing them up as legal weapons.

------
mistercow
This article really gives the impression that Cuil was a bigger deal than it
was.

------
davidw
Good news for the guys at Volunia, I guess.

------
sutro
LMCTFY (Let me Cuil that for you)

