Cuil Fail: Traffic Nearly Hits Rock Bottom | Hacker News Reader

Cuil Fail: Traffic Nearly Hits Rock Bottom

techcrunch.com

40 pointsvaksel50 comments

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

And TechCrunch continues their transformation into FuckedCompany 2.0.

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...

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Too bad they weren't working for you because I think Cuil would be better off if no one had heard of them yet. Five million people now know they are really shitty. They have to work extra hard to get those people back. It's like having a store's grand opening event with empty shelves.

Yes, they blew a huge opportunity - they would have benefited from waiting. But, assuming they haven't burned through their $33 million nest egg, if they spend wisely they could bring their numbers up and at the same time work on improving their algorithms. They still potentially have a huge cushion. The judgement they have displayed until now does not bode well for a comeback however.

One could just as easily argue that they are a victim of poor marketing. You can hype something up to a degree that you are setting yourself up for failure. Good marketing in the end is about setting expectations. The ones their marketing campaign set up would have been difficult to live up to under the best of circumstances.

Good point.

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.

>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"...

For that I wouldn't call them failures. Slow learners maybe.

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...

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.

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).

Without them too.

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.

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)

Look up the fraction of search traffic they get compared to Google (or even Yahoo) - and the ad revenue they can generate from it.

Plus they must get a decent amount of traffic from mistyped URLs in IE - I've ended up at live.com a couple of times while trying to test some XHTML/CSS/JS in IE.

Isn't Live.com actually composed of gazillion sites? I think Alexa counts all subdomains together.

On Wikipedia there are listed more than 50 subsites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live

With many of these being used directly from Microsoft desktop software, it wouldn't be so unbelievable for Live.com to be #4.

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.

try duckduckgo

Why? I already know about Wikipedia and Yahoo.

It has its own crawler, it only uses Yahoo when it can give you good results.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

>The members of Cuil have profited, learned and lost nothing - in other words, they are in an enviable position.

that's exactlythe problem, imho. the world is fucked up.

It's also too early to call it a failed investment and mere 'experience builder' for the staff.

What if Cuil still has a couple years of runway with that $33 million, or strategic investors who appreciate the 'option value' of a Google alternative? (I don't know that they have either, but they might.)

I'm sure more traffic would be nice -- if only to help train their ranking and snippet generators. And of course everyone likes their product to get positive reviews. But even without those things yet, their tech and operations may have made progress for a long-term assault on the giant search market

Indeed. People who were exposed to the site when they first opened may never come back. But, like the laundromat in my neighborhood, they could have a second "Grand Opening", only this time with better algorithms in place. It seems unlikely after dropping the ball as badly as they did, that they have the smarts to carry this out successfully. But it's still a possibility.

> The members of Cuil have profited, learned and lost nothing - in other words, they are in an enviable position.

Don't be so sure they haven't "lost nothing". The VC community is pretty small and large profile failures like this don't go unnoticed. I'd imagine that they'll have a lot harder of a time raising this much money ever again.

Perhaps that won't matter to them, but then again if they have designs on another company this could have a negative impact on how that plays out.

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..

With 150K unique visitors a month, they'll be lucky to get back a 10th of that - in bankruptcy court. What I'd like to know is how this unfolds typically with VCs when they anticipate that they will not get their money back. Can they shut everything down right away and demand all remaining funds be returned on the spot or do they typically assume the loss, write it off on their books and let the company burn through its remaining cash and grind to a halt naturally? I'm assuming the latter.

Firstly, I think they are getting a lot more than 150k visitors a month. The Alexa numbers suggest more like 10x that.

That is not a lot of visitors. My one man static content site is getting about 200k (high value niche) visitors a month.

A search engine is likely to depend on ad revenues. It might be able to target its ads better and to get high click through rates, but also needs to serve a lot of low value searches so I cannot see how it can make enough to justify a valuation that is anywhere close to a positive return.

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

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.

You have quite the positive outlook, I'll give you that much. But in my world taking $33 million is a big responsibility. The goal isn't to give yourself a nice salary and update your resume with an entry about the now-defunct search engine Cuil, it's to make your investors money.

Using your logic it would be almost impossible to fail. Sure they lost millions, solved no problems and wasted dozens of labor years, but some staffers got to network and get a new job out of it!

Exactly. My goals are more modest than yours so it is harder for me to perceive failure.

You forget opportunity cost. Apparently they have/had a high profile team. People who could've made more money elsewhere. Anyway, personal success or failure is never the same as corporate success or failure. Some of them might consider it a personal success and others may not.

I find it more interesting how intelligent people looking at their own search results could think this was enough to become a significant search engine. Maybe they just had to launch something knowing they were not ready.

Given a timetable by their VC perhaps? Interesting. That would explain a lot.

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.

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