Ask: what do all of you think of Cuill (and other search startups)?

http://www.cuill.com/founders.html

by henning • 19 years ago

3 6 19 years ago

I'm skeptical of anyone who tries to play in the same ballpark as Google, but it looks like Cuill is composed of a fair number of ex-Googlers and others who are smartypants.

Anyone know anything about Cuill and what they do that a Google search wouldn't turn up?

henning2• 19 years ago

Cuill seems noteworthy in that two of the founders are ex-Googlers and all of them seem very smart. "Cuill is a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google's, based on new search architectures and relevance methods."

I can't find anything that indicates whether there's any substance to their claims. Certainly very smart people can do interesting work whose significance they greatly embellish and overestimate (AI researchers in the 70s and 80s).

rms• 19 years ago

The logical argument against that seems to be that indexing costs aren't Google's major problem and cheaper indexing wouldn't provide much of a competitive advantage.

chadboyda2• 19 years ago

Exactly, reducing the indexing cost has little to no impact on the customers, so there is no competitive advantage to using Cuill over Google for searchers. They claim more "relevancy" but there is nothing to support that claim so far, but I'm eagerly awaiting it.

Even better relevancy may not be enough as most people believe current search technology is "good enough". It would have to be very innovative. If nothing else, they're a good acquisition target for an existing search company looking to further reduce costs and increase profits or allocate more resources towards more computationally expensive algorithms (spam filtering, semantics, content targeting, etc.)

Ask: what do all of you think of Cuill (and other search startups)?

Related Stories