5 ms·

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.
        jaf656s 16y ago
        As an advertiser, I don't care how many people are using one search engine over another, as long as it is non-zero. I care about the ROI I get and spend accordingly.
        will_critchlow 16y ago
        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 trivial time cost in setting up management, billing etc, you might not even bother with the former.
        jaf656s 16y ago
        You make a valid point, but would you not factor that into your ROI calculation?
        will_critchlow 16y ago
        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.
      - Someone 16y ago
        Hm, I wonder whether the way to take on Google would-be to remove that setting. Build an engine and offer the phone companies a part of the advertising revenues if they hard-code that engine on their phones. Problems there would be a) to beat Microsoft and Google at that game, and b) it would turn search into a low-margin commodity. Both make it hare to turn a profit.
robryan 16y ago
Especially not something funded to this degree, the barrier to what is a success is way to high with Google Search as a direct competitor. Something like the one man startup DDG can redefine success as a much more manageable target, allowing a lot longer to compete without going under.
houseabsolute 16y ago
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.
- EdiX 16y ago
  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.
- elblanco 16y ago
  I'm willing to bet that they simply didn't eat their own dog food and use their search on a day-to-day. They couldn't have. The results were so bad as to be unusable.
- shalmanese 16y ago
  http://www.quora.com/How-do-awful-products-get-shipped/answer/Ash-Rust http://www.quora.com/How-do-awful-products-get-shipped/answe...
marknutter 16y ago
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)
- kragen 16y ago
  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.
  - EdiX 16y ago
    > Isn't ask.com another search engine In a way they still are but they also to a lot of ehow type SEO.
- binomial 16y ago
  According to Gabriel, he filters out spam aggressively. So the answer is probably "yes".
- mahmud 16y ago
  Forgot where I read it (here?) but he actively removes (dis)content mills.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    yeah, there was a post about it here a bit ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549690 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549690

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.
      - jaf656s 16y ago
        As an advertiser, I don't care how many people are using one search engine over another, as long as it is non-zero. I care about the ROI I get and spend accordingly.
        will_critchlow 16y ago
        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 trivial time cost in setting up management, billing etc, you might not even bother with the former.
        jaf656s 16y ago
        You make a valid point, but would you not factor that into your ROI calculation?
        will_critchlow 16y ago
        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.
    - Someone 16y ago
      Hm, I wonder whether the way to take on Google would-be to remove that setting. Build an engine and offer the phone companies a part of the advertising revenues if they hard-code that engine on their phones. Problems there would be a) to beat Microsoft and Google at that game, and b) it would turn search into a low-margin commodity. Both make it hare to turn a profit.

robryan 16y ago

Especially not something funded to this degree, the barrier to what is a success is way to high with Google Search as a direct competitor. Something like the one man startup DDG can redefine success as a much more manageable target, allowing a lot longer to compete without going under.

houseabsolute 16y ago

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.

EdiX 16y ago
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.
elblanco 16y ago
I'm willing to bet that they simply didn't eat their own dog food and use their search on a day-to-day. They couldn't have. The results were so bad as to be unusable.
shalmanese 16y ago
http://www.quora.com/How-do-awful-products-get-shipped/answer/Ash-Rust http://www.quora.com/How-do-awful-products-get-shipped/answe...

marknutter 16y ago

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)

kragen 16y ago
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.
- EdiX 16y ago
  > Isn't ask.com another search engine In a way they still are but they also to a lot of ehow type SEO.
binomial 16y ago
According to Gabriel, he filters out spam aggressively. So the answer is probably "yes".
mahmud 16y ago
Forgot where I read it (here?) but he actively removes (dis)content mills.
- _delirium 16y ago
  yeah, there was a post about it here a bit ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549690 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549690