Cuil Fail: Traffic Nearly Hits Rock Bottom

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/27/cuil-fail-traffic-nearly-hits-rock-bottom/

by vaksel • 18 years ago

40 50 18 years ago

techcrunch.com

mrkurt• 18 years ago

And TechCrunch continues their transformation into FuckedCompany 2.0.

vaksel• 18 years ago

someone's gotta do it...the guy who started the original has decided not to do it this time around:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/27/fucked-companyadbrite-f...

bfioca• 18 years ago

I really don't think this is at all a fair or even correct statement. For one (and this should be obvious), FuckedCompany didn't report on emerging startups, just ones that were failing. Another thing is (and I feel this is pretty obvious too), I'm not surprised to see more posts about companies in trouble than ones succeeding in the first place (most companies don't succeed), and in an economic downturn this is even less surprising. What would be surprising to me would be to not hear about companies failing after having had years of reporting of emerging new startups.

russell• 18 years ago

HN had a posting about "postmodern programming" a couple of days back, so I thought I would give it a try. Google found at least 10 pages of documents, Yahoo a bunch, even answers.com found a couple. Cuil? Zip, Nada, zero. I guess I won't switch.

EDIT: My bad. Apologies to Cuil and HN. I had a typo in my query. Cuil didn't catch it, but Google suggested the correct spelling when I gave it the typo.

vizard• 18 years ago

Umm I just tried that : http://www.cuil.com/search?q=%22postmodern+programming%22

It returned 516 results for me (when including quotes in query).

schtog• 18 years ago

Without them too.

gaius2• 18 years ago

Live.com can hardly get any traffic and their search works. I had high hopes for Cuil but gave up when it became clear that their search results were simply bad or missing. They should have held a closed beta for 6 months.

raghus• 18 years ago

What's your reference for saying that live.com can hardly get any traffic?

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lang&lang... has them at #4 (which seems unbelievable but definitely past the bar of very high traffic sites)

tokenadult• 18 years ago

I suppose each user has his own preferred torture-test search terms. For mine, Cuil has recently (but NOT at launch) returned a better set of results that does Live.com. But neither wows me enough to pull me away from Google.

blackvine• 18 years ago

try duckduckgo

jonknee4• 18 years ago

Why? I already know about Wikipedia and Yahoo.

villageidiot12• 18 years ago

Call me unambitious if you like but I would be happy to fail as Cuil has "failed". They still receive over 150K uniques per month. I would gladly take half of that.

Thanks to the massive mainstream publicity they received around launch time as being a "Google Killer" they were able to expose their site to millions (yes, millions) and lock in an audience.

Sure, the numbers have dropped off since then. So what?

I'm tired of hearing the word "fail" bandied about so self-righteously as if Cuil should be ashamed of not beating Google at their own game. Like that's some kind of minor challenge. Yes, their implementation is lacking. Yes they have not taken advantage of the time since launch to work out its weaknesses. But their PR department certainly can't be accused of failure and I wouldn't be surprised if they're making some decent ad revenue off that kind of traffic.

It would be more fair - to them and to us - to call them a mixed success. One of the problems of the word 'fail' used so liberally in these contexts is that it is a blanket refusal to look at the balance of someone's achievements in its context. Used this way, it's actually a bigoted term and has the very problematic side-effect of making us less willing to take a balanced perspective on our own achievements in addition to those of the people we label with it.

chollida12• 18 years ago

> Sure, the numbers have dropped off since then. So what?

I'm guessing the problem has something to do with the 33 million in VC they took.

> It would be more fair - to them and to us - to call them a mixed success

Perhaps you could if they don't take any money but they did, and now they have to figure out how to get that 5-10 times return on the 33 million they took.

That's the reason people consider Cuil to be a failure.

axod• 18 years ago

Agreed. With that sort of backing you'd expect a bit more traffic than they have left.

villageidiot12• 18 years ago

Fair point, but I assume they paid themselves a decent salary out of that 33 million. Plus they're incorporated so the worst they face is bankruptcy proceedings, which, again, will not have an impact on the individual members.

Perhaps we could talk about a failure on the part of the VCs that invested in them but even they have an excuse - they were supporting "the next Google".

The members of Cuil will come away with a significant high profile experience on their resumes and no doubt every member will have a story that will explain away the "failure" as someone else's fault. The members of Cuil have profited, learned and lost nothing - in other words, they are in an enviable position.

rms2• 18 years ago

I imagine at this point that the VCs, if not the founders, would be very happy for an exit in the 85-100 million range..

abstractwater• 18 years ago

150K uniques a month are literally nothing for a search engine. That's called failure.

villageidiot12• 18 years ago

Maybe you mean "figuratively nothing" based on the standards you apply. 150K is certainly not "literally nothing" nor is it "called a failure" without consensus. I'm applying a different standard for 'fail' than you are. My standard comes from "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?":

A contenstant starts out strong and then "blows it" but still goes home with cash they didn't have when they started. Did they 'fail' or not?

Cuil had five million visitors during its first month and still has 150K, plus they have received $33 million from someone else's pocket. Even if they go under, the members will keep a nice slice of that for the ride home. The connections they have developed from such a high profile project position them well for their next endeavor. In addition, individual members are unlikely to be remembered as causing the 'failure' unless there is political backbiting among them after they leave (something that could well happen).

I'm sure pg would prefer people to think your way rather than mine. But I can't help feeling I wouldn't mind being in the position of Cuil's founders even if the hackers think I failed to slay the giant.

JabavuAdams• 18 years ago

This is business. It's not about the visitors, it's about the $$$. If you don't make enough money to continue operations, you fail. Period.

They haven't reached that point yet, but they may soon.

Your argument seems suspiciously like being happy that you sell a lot of product, when in fact you lose some money on each product sold.

acgourley3• 18 years ago

Wasn't Cuil all about getting acceptable search results with less iron in the server room? If that's the case, no one should suspect they could beat Google.

I really haven't researched this, but I was under the impression they were hoping to get bought by a search giant looking to cut the operating overhead of their search division.

If that's true, they don't care about uniques, and thats why they don't seem to be doing much (from the outside).

jonknee4• 18 years ago

But the lack of users is a sign that they don't have acceptable results. I found the results to be horrible and like 99% of other people who tried it out won't be back.

acgourley3• 18 years ago

Not true - their results would need to be substantially better than google to get people to navigate away from their iGoogle pages, add firefox search widgets, etc. Acceptable doesn't change user behavior.

villageidiot12• 18 years ago

Agreed. But I sure wish I had their marketing team working for me - 5 million views the first month for a piece of crap like that is no small achievement.

villageidiot12• 18 years ago

Agreed. The idea that Cuil wanted nothing less than world domination and the death of Google is a naive assumption. None of the founders is going to go home hungry. You can be sure that the $33 million of VC will get put to good use - new swimming pools, private jets, etc.

dotcoma2• 18 years ago

>You can be sure that the $33 million of VC will get put to good use - new swimming pools, private jets, etc.

so, that's what you call "success"? It almost seems like, by your standards, Google's founders, who took in less money and worked their asses to buy themselves a plane after 10 years of incredibly hard work, are probably the ones who "failed"...

bprater• 18 years ago

I don't think beating Google is all about "server hardware efficiency". I'm not sure how they sold VCs on this concept.

It is about creating result sets so amazing that you pick up your phone and tell your friends and family about it.

acgourley3• 18 years ago

Getting bought by Google just might be, though.

(And yes, I know they turned down an offer when they first started up, but they may have just been holding out for more.)

amirnathoo• 18 years ago

Creating great results sets, or at least much better ones than the competition, is why Google won in the first place. But I think the real battle-ground now is the interface. If Cuil or SearchMe really believed their technology was so much better than Google's at delivering search results they would have no need to also experiment with the UI.

dmix• 18 years ago

(Quality results + boring but usable interface) > (average results + a great interface)

Herring• 18 years ago

Up until we have computers understanding speech in real time, I'd say the interface's goal is to give us links & just get out of the way.

rms2• 18 years ago

On the topic, one of the best reddit comments of all time: Cuils as a unit of measure.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/police_raid...

Cuil Fail: Traffic Nearly Hits Rock Bottom

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