16 ms·

Cuil Goes Down for Good

iampims 16y ago
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.
darwinGod 16y ago
I hope Cuil is open sourced!! Would love to learn from from Cuil 's cuil code :)
- darwinGod 16y ago
  Wonder why this was downvoted.. Is it bad to hope that Cuil is open sourced??
  - code_duck 16y ago
    What do you want to learn - how to make a not-very-good search indexer?
    - boyter 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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.
dedward 16y ago
Am I the only one who's happy about that? They were a nuisance to website operators....
jacquesm 16y ago
I think I called that right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1693053 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1693053 "Cuil is dead". I don't think this comes as a surprise to anybody.
johnglasgow 16y ago
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.
SLJones 16y ago
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.
tzury 16y ago
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
- vladd 16y ago
  You're just seeing the actual outcome. The investors paid for the full probabilistic model, where in 10% of the cases Cuil would have succeeded in beating Google and would have made tens of billions of dollars. That alone is worth 10% * tens of billions = billions. 33M for that doesn't seem much in that perspective. Your statement about "I am certainly sure" and "10 times more" ignores the probability distribution of your potential success, and how big is your success in each one of the cases.
  - tzury 16y ago
    As my accountant likes to repeat that cliché over and over, "Even-though figures do not lie, lairs can figure" - All I was saying is dead simple, and this is actually the values I was raised by, one should treat some one else's money 70 times more carefully then one's own. I am sure not everyone would agree to subscribe to this rule, but I do. By all means it should not take you $33M to recognize that you are in the wrong direction, the first 2-3 should do the job, unless you choose not to see what is happening in front of your eyes. This is to be said to the founders and investors altogether. Cuil was a joke, an expensive joke, period.
- bryanh 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
TamDenholm 16y ago
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.
- forsaken 16y ago
  Bing seems to be doing a pretty good job. With google's privacy snafu's and other mishaps, I could see them getting upset within 5 years.
  - robryan 16y ago
    Bing is the default search in IE, it had a significant chunk of the market with Live Search previously and started off with a $100 million dollar advertising blitz. Add to that the number and talent of the employees working on it and you have something no startup could hope to replicate.
    - ramchip 16y ago
      The grandparent wasn't talking about startups, though: i'm not sure if a company will ever be able to take on Google in search directly
      - okiujhyg 16y ago
        Why not? Search has a very low barrier to customer switching. If I want to switch to a new search engine that provides better answer than google I only need to change one setting in my browser - it's easier than picking a new desktop color
        evgen 16y ago
        Once again, you are not the customer, you are the product. Search engine customers (advertisers) gravitate to the largest player because it provides a larger inventory of users/searches to select from. Search advertising is a winner-takes-all market and it would take a huge shift in inventory to change this momentum. Once it starts shifting it is hard to stop and the changing economic factors make it easier for the insurgent to capitalize on whatever mis-steps the incumbent made, but there is a lot of inertia to overcome to get this ball rolling. A far more likely scenario for a major change in this sector would be for social search to eclipse the crawl it and rank it model that is currently dominant.
Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
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.
twidlit 16y ago
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.
- petercooper 16y ago
  I voted you up but I don't find it strange. yegg only answers to himself and his users while operating with tight constraints. Cuil, however, had a bumper budget and a cadre of smart people with a plethora of ideas and directions in mind. To me, Cuil looked like a prime example of design by committee whereas DDG is clearly opinionated but thrives because of it.
- moultano 16y ago
  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.
  - ErrantX 16y ago
    Ok, so the problem they were solving was more difficult... but they are going after similar markets (or at least segments of the same market). Technical achievements are great; but Gabriel is much better placed. He is self funded, he is building on existing tools (always good advice), he leveraged us, the hacker crowd, who can be very loyal, he clearly listens to his customers etc. Cuil, on the other hand, produced some very confusing (if technically interesting) things and then ranted about those who criticised them. They had a lot of big bucks VC money (always a warning sign) and didn't appear to be leveraging loyalty from any user base. Even if the problems these two startups are facing are different; there is a lesson here. One is how not to build a product, and one is :)
  - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
jedwhite 16y ago
$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 16y ago
  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.
  - points 16y ago
    I thought about (and setup a prototype) starting an ebay competitor a few years ago now. The main thing it was going to do differently, was instead of having a fixed ending time for an auction, it would be conducted like a regular auction - in real time, via AJAX, and the auction ends once no one else bids. Seemed like that realtime element, along with no 'sniping', fairer bidding, a cool UI etc would be a good reason for people to switch. But the network effect is massive. To be successful as an ebay competitor, I think you'd need a pretty large marketing budget, or several people working on promotion full time. It's ripe for the picking though. And massive profits.
  - acabal 16y ago
    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.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
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 http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory
- darwinGod 16y ago
  Speaking of legacy, wonder if there would be interest in Cuil as a apache project... who knows what might arise from its ashes! :)
- mattmcknight 16y ago
  I think the massive hype they ran prelaunch is a good anti-lesson. They had to do all of their learning in full view.
- ivank 16y ago
  Cuil theory reminds me of the pataphor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pataphor#.27Pataphor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pataphor#.27Pataphor
  - fractallyte 16y ago
    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!)
elblanco 16y ago
Hard to overcome having your company name be synonymous for abstraction from reality.
sabat 16y ago
But ... but ... if it goes down, how will it ever kill Google? =:-o
- sabat 16y ago
  That was totally worth the downvote.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
sachinag 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
- FreeRadical 16y ago
  Facebook?
- nishantmodak 16y ago
  In China, Baidu for sure!
- code_duck 16y ago
  What on earth is 'Blekko'? I must be so out of the loop.

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.

darwinGod 16y ago

I hope Cuil is open sourced!! Would love to learn from from Cuil 's cuil code :)

darwinGod 16y ago
Wonder why this was downvoted.. Is it bad to hope that Cuil is open sourced??
- code_duck 16y ago
  What do you want to learn - how to make a not-very-good search indexer?
  - boyter 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.

dedward 16y ago

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

jacquesm 16y ago

I think I called that right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1693053 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1693053 "Cuil is dead". I don't think this comes as a surprise to anybody.

johnglasgow 16y ago

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.

SLJones 16y ago

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.

tzury 16y ago

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

vladd 16y ago
You're just seeing the actual outcome. The investors paid for the full probabilistic model, where in 10% of the cases Cuil would have succeeded in beating Google and would have made tens of billions of dollars. That alone is worth 10% * tens of billions = billions. 33M for that doesn't seem much in that perspective. Your statement about "I am certainly sure" and "10 times more" ignores the probability distribution of your potential success, and how big is your success in each one of the cases.
- tzury 16y ago
  As my accountant likes to repeat that cliché over and over, "Even-though figures do not lie, lairs can figure" - All I was saying is dead simple, and this is actually the values I was raised by, one should treat some one else's money 70 times more carefully then one's own. I am sure not everyone would agree to subscribe to this rule, but I do. By all means it should not take you $33M to recognize that you are in the wrong direction, the first 2-3 should do the job, unless you choose not to see what is happening in front of your eyes. This is to be said to the founders and investors altogether. Cuil was a joke, an expensive joke, period.
bryanh 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.

TamDenholm 16y ago

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.

forsaken 16y ago
Bing seems to be doing a pretty good job. With google's privacy snafu's and other mishaps, I could see them getting upset within 5 years.
- robryan 16y ago
  Bing is the default search in IE, it had a significant chunk of the market with Live Search previously and started off with a $100 million dollar advertising blitz. Add to that the number and talent of the employees working on it and you have something no startup could hope to replicate.
  - ramchip 16y ago
    The grandparent wasn't talking about startups, though: i'm not sure if a company will ever be able to take on Google in search directly
    - okiujhyg 16y ago
      Why not? Search has a very low barrier to customer switching. If I want to switch to a new search engine that provides better answer than google I only need to change one setting in my browser - it's easier than picking a new desktop color
      - evgen 16y ago
        Once again, you are not the customer, you are the product. Search engine customers (advertisers) gravitate to the largest player because it provides a larger inventory of users/searches to select from. Search advertising is a winner-takes-all market and it would take a huge shift in inventory to change this momentum. Once it starts shifting it is hard to stop and the changing economic factors make it easier for the insurgent to capitalize on whatever mis-steps the incumbent made, but there is a lot of inertia to overcome to get this ball rolling. A far more likely scenario for a major change in this sector would be for social search to eclipse the crawl it and rank it model that is currently dominant.

Andrew_Quentin 16y ago

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.

twidlit 16y ago

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.

petercooper 16y ago
I voted you up but I don't find it strange. yegg only answers to himself and his users while operating with tight constraints. Cuil, however, had a bumper budget and a cadre of smart people with a plethora of ideas and directions in mind. To me, Cuil looked like a prime example of design by committee whereas DDG is clearly opinionated but thrives because of it.
moultano 16y ago
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.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  Ok, so the problem they were solving was more difficult... but they are going after similar markets (or at least segments of the same market). Technical achievements are great; but Gabriel is much better placed. He is self funded, he is building on existing tools (always good advice), he leveraged us, the hacker crowd, who can be very loyal, he clearly listens to his customers etc. Cuil, on the other hand, produced some very confusing (if technically interesting) things and then ranted about those who criticised them. They had a lot of big bucks VC money (always a warning sign) and didn't appear to be leveraging loyalty from any user base. Even if the problems these two startups are facing are different; there is a lesson here. One is how not to build a product, and one is :)
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago

jedwhite 16y ago

$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 16y ago
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.
- points 16y ago
  I thought about (and setup a prototype) starting an ebay competitor a few years ago now. The main thing it was going to do differently, was instead of having a fixed ending time for an auction, it would be conducted like a regular auction - in real time, via AJAX, and the auction ends once no one else bids. Seemed like that realtime element, along with no 'sniping', fairer bidding, a cool UI etc would be a good reason for people to switch. But the network effect is massive. To be successful as an ebay competitor, I think you'd need a pretty large marketing budget, or several people working on promotion full time. It's ripe for the picking though. And massive profits.
- acabal 16y ago
  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.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

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 http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory

darwinGod 16y ago
Speaking of legacy, wonder if there would be interest in Cuil as a apache project... who knows what might arise from its ashes! :)
mattmcknight 16y ago
I think the massive hype they ran prelaunch is a good anti-lesson. They had to do all of their learning in full view.
ivank 16y ago
Cuil theory reminds me of the pataphor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pataphor#.27Pataphor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pataphor#.27Pataphor
- fractallyte 16y ago
  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!)

elblanco 16y ago

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

sabat 16y ago

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

sabat 16y ago
That was totally worth the downvote.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sachinag 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.
FreeRadical 16y ago
Facebook?
nishantmodak 16y ago
In China, Baidu for sure!
code_duck 16y ago
What on earth is 'Blekko'? I must be so out of the loop.