Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

In this day and age building "X is better than well known Y product" means nothing. You could build a car with 5 times the gas mileage of any car around today and I bet you'll be hard pressed to make a dime for the first few years while competing with the likes of Ford, Toyota or General Motors. People don't care about things being better when it comes to the web, people stick with what they know and if you're a Google user like me who is also vested in Gmail, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, etc then you're in too deep to switch to any other search engine.

I remember Cuil when it launched. They were onto something great, made some pretty bold claims and in many ways were better than Google at search and look what happened to them? Nobody cared and they died in a huge internet tire fire. Sure the issues with poor results didn't help and people wanted them to succeed but lets be honest here, Cuil would have ended up like Bing (a few users but nothing to gloat about). People are too lazy to switch to anything new especially when it comes to search, it takes time to woo a user from another product that still does the job perfectly.

Having said that, this kid is 17 and he's done a f*cking amazing job. How many people can say at the age of 17 they built anything remotely cool like this? I'm sure some can, but not many. If he keeps on this path, he'll be achieving bigger things in his 20's and 30's than this and it'll be well-deserved. The interviewer was pretty bad though, he had no clue whatsoever an insult to the kid they were interviewing who deserves at least an interviewer with a remotely above average IQ.

Cuil didn't die because people were "too lazy to switch to something new." It died because among the few who did know what Cuil was, opinions ranged from "disappointment" to "laughingstock". Remember "Cuil theory", in which degrees of disconnection from reality were measured in Cuils?

Cuil was ambitious, and that was laudable and did get it some attention. But unfortunately it was nowhere near good enough for the level of hype they built. Many of these "Better than the big guy" products have the same problem, albeit to a lesser degree — they are better by some very specific metric, but that metric isn't the one that most people associate with the product's value. In Cuil's case, relevant and accurate results were what people wanted, but Cuil was worse on those axes than ancient search engines like Mamma.com.

> Cuil didn't die because people were "too lazy to switch to something new." It died because among the few who did know what Cuil was, opinions ranged from "disappointment" to "laughingstock".

Cuil died the day it was announced. They went live with a great PR fanfare and a corrupted index, everyone marginally interested in it saw it when it was broken, which is how it got its reputation as a laughing stock.

Let's not forget the Cpedia pivot, where they turned their search engine into a sort of Dadaist Wikipedia. That was probably an even bigger mistake than launching a broken search engine (and more ambitious, too).

Cuil is an interesting example, but I have a very different recollection of it.

Cuil may have been on to something great, but their technology didn't produce results. To say "nobody cared" is completely false. They launched to pretty serious fanfare. The technology press was, for a brief period, infatuated with the idea of ex-Googlers killing Google.

It was the technology that failed. The results were a mess and very often completely irrelevant. Cuil was well positioned to compete head-to-head with Google, but they failed to execute. I gave them a shot and they sent me right back into Google's arms (I did the same with DDG as well fwiw).

I think search, more than anything else, is an area that gives you the best chance of gaining a toe-hold against a monolithic company like Google. Although you'll be acquired the moment you gain any real traction:)

A few years ago, I worked at a startup peripherally related to the search space and we did some usability studies on the google search page. What we found then, more or less, is that people generally feel like there is no problem with google's search results, and if you pressed them to try to find something that google could not find easily, instead of thinking google let them down, they essentially blamed themselves for not being able to find it. It's hard to sell a solution to a problem people don't think they have.

With that kind of thinking, it's really hard to build a product to go head to head with google that is so much better that can change people's habits directly. From my perspective, you either need to somehow change the equation for some sort of query attribute (e.g. google may not be as timely as twitter so I'll switch to it when something like an earthquake happens) and eat slowly away at the google advantage, or you need to build a product that first targets the thought leaders (something like building a better code search or social search) and then make google un-cool to use.

Either way, it's a tough row to hoe.

And if you are successful enough: being copied by a company with orders of magnitude more engineers, money, etc.

So I would bet that differentiating on any "pure technology" query attribute is out. Otoh there is so much potential in twitter and Ark and friends.

Maybe it's difficult to topple the giants, but you should not pick Cuil as an example. Cuil was awful and it died because it put unrelated information together. It certainly did not "still [do] the job perfectly".

Cuil maybe have been an initial failure but I seem to recall numerous tweaks being made to the results a few months after launch that fixed most of those issues and made it a decent search engine. They had the index, the algorithm and priority of results just needed to be tweaked a bit.

If you want a better example of a good search engine with decent results that has failed to compete with Google it would be Bing. If you use this blind search tool: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ that returns results from both Google and Bing. Bing is winning in terms of most relevant results and yet has failed to really steal away any of Google's user base in the long run is this not more than enough proof that people don't care if another search engine returns better results? I think it does.

There are people out there who think Google is the Internet, hows that for brand recognition? People who don't even own computers or don't have the Internet have most likely heard of Google at some stage in their lives.

If this were true, wouldn't we all still be using IE?

Internet Explorer isn't a search engine and to debase your statement a little, a lot of people still use Internet Explorer. Chrome is the most popular browser at the moment and to be honest I'd be shocked if it weren't considering how heavily Google market it (front page of Google, Youtube, etc).

If Google were to advertise a worthy adversary to their search engine on the home page I am willing to almost bet that the competitor would score quite a few new users.

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