Paul Buchheit

Where "someone" = MSFT, who has already shown that they are willing to pay a lot for non-functional search engines. - Paul Buchheit

That is what I was thinking, too. - Robert Scoble

You'd think they'd work toward getting something relevant if you search on "cuil launch" - Michael Hussein Markman

It's the only thing that makes sense when you look at how bad the results are. You don't roll out something like unless you are just showing off the interface. - Kevin Bondelli

Would also explain the weak branding. Who cares, if it's just going to get plugged into something else? - Chris Baskind

Not very good results at the moment I will say - shinchi via twhirl

It must be so hard to launch something in a realm where there isn't much tolerance/patience for incremental improvement. The bar in this space is high and consumers are very picky. Look at Yahoo. Their search is actually pretty damn good. However, they keep losing share. - Christopher Sacca

agree with Sacca - also, I thought the people behind Cuil had already sold some search technology to Google and hence they wanted to try it out on their own this time - so if anything they'd have more intent than others not to flip. - Adam Kazwell

100% agree with Paul .... what they have launched really sucks and I don't think I would be going back again to search .... Sacca seems to be right that the bar is really high in this space and whatever gets launched really needs to work well or it will fail - Raza via Alert Thingy

It is also strange that Cuil has no presence on twitter or friendfeed. There is no friendfeed.com/cuil. There is a twitter.com/cuil account but no twitters there. It would be interesting to hear from someone at Cuil on the FriendFeed/Twitter as to why they launched with the poor results... - Atul Arora

Yahoo's crawl speed is not close to GOOG. - Michael

It's something, and a reasonable first step. Yes, the results aren't that great but they seem reasonably comprehensive. Their make-or-break will be showing continuous visible progress - if they don't, sure, they're just a $XXXm dog and pony show for another company too scared of Google to see straight, but if they do improve, there may be potential for even more upside than that. - David Weekly

Google Killer? I do not even need to look to know the answer - Mike Reynolds

maybe there could be business in opening up their index? - Alex Gawley

I'm not saying that the results are good, but people seem overly critical. I saw one piece on how their name is too hard to spell. But if they did become popular, this would not remain a problem. - Clare Dibble

It's embarrassing IMO. The results are thin and the images completely wrong. Not good is one thing ... Cuil seems a cut below not good right now. - AJ Kohn

There results aren't -bad- but they are in no way great. Worse yet, anytime you start throwing around X-killer, you are pretty much setting yourself up for destruction. - Steve Spalding

can a startup beat google with a link-based algorithmic search engine? msft's cashback.com is an example of changing the game. trovix.com's deep semantic indexing is changing the game. same for thefind.com. mahalo human-powered engine is too. Who else? - Tim Connors

Paul, maybe they launched because they believed gathering data and feedback from the public would help them improve their ranking and other aspects of their service? I don't think that their ranking is anywhere near as good as Google's right now. But, there's no a priori reason to believe that Cuil ranking won't improve quickly. Anna, Russell, et.al. are actually pretty sharp. I for one am excited to see another player in search with new ideas about infrastructure and user experience. - Kevin Scott

They of all people should have known to release with fast results (latency).. The fact that they did not surprises me, and had the exact effect I would expect.. I have no plans on going back, good results or not.. :) - Derek Collison

Does "launch early" work for search engines? Don't think so.. - Jing Lim

One of the nice things about Google is the speed they index. Consider the indexing of a blog post made yesterday: Google already picked up the post and Cuil has not. http://www.cuil.com/search?q=C... VERSUS http://www.google.com/search?h... Google shows 367 results and that is trouble for Cuil. They'll need to work on that quickly to convince people they are being serious. - LPH™

it's about as useful as Archie(Gopher ref) - clarke thomas

considering I got server overloaded errors when I tried it at first, I'd have to say launching early was a big error in judgement. - sean808080

The indexing speed of Google and other search engines is pretty good, but another area that needs fixing is when content moves. It takes a long time for Google to catch up. Example: Let's say you move your blog or an early well-praised site goes stale, many search engines have trouble adjusting their rankings to the new site or to push down the older one. - Loren Heiny

Trouble is that indexing and ranking are closely linked. If all you return is a hitlist there's no good ranking that can be done. Can't yet tell whether they're in that situation. What I don't get is why the rush to launch now. - Daniel Dulitz

I read similar thoughts on Reddit yesterday and they made some sense... is there any chance all the negative buzz right now is going to hurt their buyability though? - Philipp Lenssen

IMHO there have to be better ways to show off your very own crawling+indexing technologies than opening up to the public and getting thrashed for not delivering what people expect when you dub your service search engine. I have a hard time believing that the cuil/cuill guys did not know what they were doing though ... Were they pushed to release by financiers? Were they in dire need of usage data? - Mustafa K. Isik

I do think they built Cuil to be bought. The reason they launched is they hoped their valuation will go up with all the press blitz... Which seems pretty well planned.... I think they went overboard selling themselves to the press and did not expect some of the back-lash. Of course, the saying goes - "All press is good press :)". So who knows this might indeed increase their valuation to 100s of millions :). It all depends on what the folks over at MSFT think/know about search :)) - Bindu Reddy

someone cough microsoft cough - Sarah Perez

M$ bait! ah ha!! Bindu and Sarah, you're on to something there!! - Susan Beebe

I liked this thread so much that I blogged it: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... - Erick Schonfeld

As of yesterday, they didn't even have their own name indexed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/b... - Brady Brim-DeForest

actually, they are off to a decent start. They have a nice interface that needs work, and some results are good and many others bad. I can tell you it takes about a year to getting your feet under you and figure out where you can fit in the search ecosystem. They are funded for a three year run it seems, so I would give them a year and see where the product is at. - Jason Calacanis

grabbing contextual images process is too weird! (o_O) - Pınar Yanardağ

great discussion. the more I've read about the various GRAVE screw-ups (with porn images being linked to some people's bios, etc.), the more I tend to agree that they must have known that things weren't ready. It just feels too much like a prototype... Thus the buy-out scenario seems plausible. Who knows, buying their indexing technology could actually give a boost to MSFT or even Yahoo, given that they have a hard time keeping up on the tech/scale side of search. One thing we do know is that Google... - Alex Schleber

... isn't going to buy them :) I wrote a post on the branding aspect of the Cuil debacle earlier today -> http://businessmindhacks.com/p... but now I'm not so sure anymore if they were even serious about the whole thing. Maybe they're having a hearty laugh right now that no one is getting the joke. If they are serious though, it's a horrible launch and horrible branding. - Alex Schleber

Is it possible that they might be taking advantage of the disconnect between mainstream and social media? Cuil has made it in the news but to what extent has the negativity made it to the mainstream? If people get their news outside of the social media circle (which, as we are all quickly discovering, is a vast majority) and only hear that "Google killer Cuil has launched today" but don't dig deep enough to discover its faults, won't Cuil get some real attention? Maybe, but the funny part is that most of those people will be using Google to find it :) - Derick Valadao

I think it is tough doing a PR launch. I think the obsession with dropping a nuke over the PR is an helpful one. Mightily prefer to build it up over weeks and months of relationship building but most importantly great execution and a great product. - azeem