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Comment by pesenti | Hacker News Reader

This feels like history repeating. We tried the same thing 10 years ago (remember Clusty?). We got a lot of press with the same kind of silly titles - "Dump Google use Clusty", "Should you ditch Google? Clusty", "Will Clusty be the next Google". We played the privacy card. We had big fans and some significant traffic. But we never managed to make a significant dent in the market. And we grew convinced that nobody could take on Google head on.

At the end we sold it for little money, focused entirely on the enterprise (which had always been our main focus) and sold to IBM for real money.

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remember Clusty?

Nope.

You just weren't born yet.

Growing convinced might have killed it. If you're passionate about something, you might have found a way to beat Google... Not saying you did badly or anything; I never heard of the engine (before my time probably). I just mean to say it's a pity you grew convinced that Google was unbeatable.

Hmm... I spent 12 years building my business and you tell me I wasn't passionate. We actually did beat Google but in the enterprise space.

The best way to take on Google is to render web search obsolete (the same way Microsoft is becoming irrelevant because the PC is becoming irrelevant), not by trying to match with limited resources and knowledge what they do very very well with enormous resources and know-how. Thinking otherwise is not being passionate, it's being presumptuous.

Yes, change the way the game is being played, but don't play the game that Google is playing. Change the way people search for things. Right now everything is based on the keyword search, there has to be a better way. Make the web irrelevant the same way that gopher became irrelevant. I really don't want to be using a web browser 10 years from now.

Were you responsible for the moralist censorship of Clusty's results or did that come after you sold it?

No that was after we sold it.

Thank you. I enjoyed Clusty when it first came out; I thought the clustering feature at the heart of it was really innovative, and the UI was nice and clean. But after the new rules came out, I abandoned it completely.

Cuil, enough said.

But we never managed to make a significant dent in the market. And we grew convinced that nobody could take on Google head on.

Depressing. Mozilla can and should take them on, Google Search is biased given that their real customers are the advertisers and extremely ad heavy. Amazon could make a dent too but they'd be biased as well.

Maybe Apple...

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