Cuil did it by the start-up text book - stealth mode to big launch and then massive PR. That gets the early adopters buzzing and then its off to the races. That works beautifully when the start-up is actually creating a new market. Twitter is a brilliant example (leaving out tech issues and monetization, Twitter has to be one of the best examples of rapid market adoption). However this does not work well when it is a mature market. It is hard to see why so experienced a team at Cuil would have made such a fundamental strategic error.
Unfortunately for Cuil, this could be a great opportunity for Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) to shine.
Like most people who saw the Cuil hype, I did some searches and got the same “curate’s egg” - something that is partly good and partly bad, but as a result is entirely spoilt. Some searches were really interesting and the results were way better. The Explore by Category from my search on Vista P2P is phenomenal. However other searches simply came up blank, searches that Google (and even Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask deliver just fine). To Cuil, my other searches may have seemed “obscure” but they were not obscure to me. That experience means that I will not change my searching habits. To use Cuil I would effectively have to search in Google as well, in case Cuil had missed it. No way, in other words.
Cuil clearly understand that this is a scale game. You have to search as much if not more than the competition. Thus their PR about “the world’s biggest search engine”. For a start-up to compete on scale right out of the box is strategically…weird is the word that comes to mind. Particularly if you don’t have some disruptive technology that changes the economics. They understood the need, PR delivered, execution failed. They must have known it would fail. Surely?
Let me try this pitch on the next VC I meet. “To win we have to be as big as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft the day we launch, if not we don’t get any adoption”. I don’t think I would get the check, but maybe I don’t have the magic touch.
Why is this a big opportunity for Yahoo BOSS? Yahoo already has the scale in crawling and indexing. They already find those “obscure” searches that Cuil missed. The cool stuff on Cuil, the 3 panes and the Explore by Category, can be built by self-funded start-ups in their garage. These will probably be vertical, it will be search embedded into other apps. It is search as infrastructure. Come on Yahoo, you have Icahn off you back, make this work!
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Cuil is definitely going for it, but it's hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google's done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack - working with Yahoo BOSS.
We have a full web index from Yahoo, but we change the results based on what people are actually looking at online right now. This means we tend to surface news, reviews, pictures and videos that are hot, right now, related to your query. And as the zeitgeist of the online community shifts, so do our search results. In other words, we always keep you "in the know" as you search.
That's highly differentiated in the areas where we can apply our "secret sauce". But if a user does a long tail query – one that we can't reach with our own magic (today!) - then we return results that are only ever "as bad" (i.e. very good) as Yahoo.
Now... we're still in alpha ;) but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search
We're also really looking forward to seeing other innovative approaches come to market leveraging BOSS. It's an exciting time.
Posted by: tobias | July 29, 2008 7:17 PM
Maybe they Cuil did it as desperate attention getter in hopes to gain some big investors.
Posted by: Rob | July 29, 2008 8:49 PM
well said Bernard. why bother with the back-end when you can borrow y!'s and differentiate with relevancy/ranking, presentation, innovative data joins, etc.
Anyone interested please read more at...
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/
Join the yahoo! group at...
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ysearchboss/
become a fan at...
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Yahoo-Search-BOSS/20774291628?ref=s
Posted by: bill | July 29, 2008 10:27 PM
Hey! I´ll just keep searching with my old search engine Google powered www.treehoo.com that plants trees for most of its profit. It´s an easy way to fight global warming and help our planet.
Posted by: Green searches | July 30, 2008 12:50 AM
had also 'limited' or 'wrong' results coming back from search terms, an interesting search for a well known blog returned 'not found' ;) http://redseasound.com/blog
Posted by: roger | July 30, 2008 1:39 AM
Probably because it is too easy to build something like that:
http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/
Sam
Posted by: Sam | July 30, 2008 1:52 AM
Yuil is quite a clever parody. The tag line is pretty funny as well - searching enough pages. This is a good point though, in reality the number of pages indexed is totally irrelevant metric since one only need to look at first few pages of results.
Cluuz (www.cluuz.com) does not look like Yuil (nor Cuil), but we think that it provides a fresh new approach to search and discovery by leveraging our semantic technology and Yahoo!BOSS API. Cluuz is an example that it is possible to create a responsive search engine without having to pre-index the whole web by performing semantic entity extraction, image extraction, ranking and clustering in real-time. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Posted by: Alex Z | July 30, 2008 6:57 AM