
Cuil Goes Down for Good - cristinacordova
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/17/cuil-goes-down-and-we-hear-its-down-for-good/
======
RyanMcGreal
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>

~~~
ivank
Cuil theory reminds me of the pataphor:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pataphor#.27Pataphor>

~~~
fractallyte
Intriguing concept! This is a apt description of the illogic inherent in
dreams. Come to think of it, perhaps 'Inception' missed out a golden
opportunity to depict each level as a pataphor of the parent one...

(Apologies for the off-topic comment; new ideas are exciting!)

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twidlit
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.

~~~
moultano
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
accomplishment if true. I'm surprised they weren't acquired for that. It's
unfortunate that their search quality wasn't up to snuff yet.

~~~
jimbokun
"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?

~~~
wheels
At the moment DDG is effectively a customer, not a competitor. If DDG ever
became large enough to show up on Bing's radar (Bing currently has 600x as
much traffic), you can bet that the terms would change.

~~~
MikeCapone
As far as I know, DDG isn't paying for access. But I might be wrong about
that. Maybe they are they paying for Bing, but not Yahoo?

~~~
HNer
Yahoo have recently announced that they will soon be charging for Boss.

[http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/08/api_updates...](http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/08/api_updates_and_changes.html)

"We are exploring a potential fee-based structure as well as ad-revenue models
that will enable BOSS developers to monetize their offerings. When we roll out
these changes, BOSS will no longer be a free service to developers."

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jedwhite
$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 dominate search in 10 years, or that
most people will search the way they do now.

~~~
savrajsingh
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 from 2010 is the same as, say, 20 years starting from the year 2000.

But I think chances are high that Google will dominate search in 10 years. If
someone discovered a better way (and there are many, they just haven't caught
on yet) they would just buy 'em out, right? ;) Or maybe Bing will win. But
then it's Microsoft winning, and Microsoft is older than me.

~~~
acabal
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.

~~~
lepht
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.

~~~
gxti
Craigslist is minimal but reasonably well-designed. Amazon on the other hand I
would go so far as to call awful. The #1 thing I'm looking for when I open a
product page is the details about the product and it's _below the fold_. But
still, they know far more than me about what sells, so I bow to their
judgment.

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iampims
I have a feeling that Google is more worried about a new search paradigm —
like social search for instance — than its current competitors in the
"index+rank search model".

Hunch + Quora + Facebook questions could well be the biggest threat to
Google's quasi-monopoly.

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elblanco
Hard to overcome having your company name be synonymous for abstraction from
reality.

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sachinag
Does this leave Blekko as the last standing independent Google-killer? (DDG
doesn't count to me because yegg isn't (yet) indexing the web himself.)

~~~
gorog
Yandex has its own index and shows good results in English (but no photo/video
search). Exalead has its own index too but it lacks a good junk filter à la
PageRank.

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SLJones
Sad, liked the fact that I could search and not have my search saved for data
mining purposes. I think privacy is an important thing. I think giving one
company Google all that power is a very dangerous thing. I hope people wake up
and start supporting alternative search engines and use Google as a last
resort.

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johnglasgow
User acquisition strategy is as important for a search engine as it is for any
other consumer web company. Many that read HN are ahead of the curve when it
comes to new technologies such as DDG. 99% of America just uses what they have
until it breaks. So Cuil's lack of high quality results may not have been
their only reason leading to their demise, but with 33m in funding I hope a
solid chunk was devoted to acquiring main street America. Yes, Google
initially won by having higher quality results, but any new player with higher
quality results will only be marginally better than Google.

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darwinGod
I hope Cuil is open sourced!!

Would love to learn from from Cuil 's cuil code :)

~~~
darwinGod
Wonder why this was downvoted.. Is it bad to hope that Cuil is open sourced??

~~~
code_duck
What do you want to learn - how to make a not-very-good search indexer?

~~~
boyter
No. How to make a highly scaleable search engine. Examples of this sort of
thing are not out there, other then nutch and that hasnt been proven as
scaling out to the size of cuil.

Cuil's problem was with their ranking, which may be related to what they were
indexing, but not to their ability to scale out.

~~~
code_duck
It's highly scalable in which sense?

Their index was very large, but their traffic was not. I think I've run
websites that handled as much traffic as Cuil did on a good day.

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jacquesm
I think I called that right:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1693053>

"Cuil is dead".

I don't think this comes as a surprise to anybody.

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TamDenholm
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.

~~~
marknutter
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)

~~~
mahmud
Forgot where I read it (here?) but he actively removes (dis)content mills.

~~~
_delirium
yeah, there was a post about it here a bit ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549690>

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dedward
Am I the only one who's happy about that? They were a nuisance to website
operators....

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Andrew_Quentin
I remember the days when so much hype was around it and now when I read the
title I thought to myself, hmm, I remember that name, but who are they
exactly?

It feels like they were one of those x factor winners or big brother winners
who have a lot of media attention to start with and then become complacent and
do not keep up of playing the game of keeping the attention of the public.
Marketing is not just five minutes of fame.

I think also that what the above teaches is that there is a lot of hype in
social media. Sure there are real serious and enlightening conversations, but
much of it is hype and trends and discussions. Maybe it is best to retreat
from mass communications like the internet and focus on your projects only.
Better be an actor in my own show than a spectator in others.

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sabat
But ... but ... if it goes down, how will it ever kill Google? =:-o

~~~
sabat
That was totally worth the downvote.

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tzury
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

~~~
bryanh
But would you be targeting an sector as attractive to the investors as Google?
The investors weren't worrying about the making "just anything" useful or
profitable. They wanted Google profits and Google uses.

~~~
tzury
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.

~~~
btilly
_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
(compounding annually), then you now need a 25-fold potential return on
investment for the fund to have a chance to meet its goals.

~~~
jbm
... 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.

~~~
tzury
I wonder the same, perhaps, this is the new HN.

