Seems to me that everyone’s missing the original value proposition of Cuil. Their original claim was that they were going to build a search index at 1/10th the cost of what Google has produced. Has anyone asked Tom or Anna at Cuil what their actual index/search costs are?
I’m not surprised that Cuil’s search results are poor. It doesn’t appear that they have anything special in terms of a Page Ranking algorithm at this point, but that really doesn’t matter if they were able to achieve an index/search at 1/10th of Google’s cost. If Tom & Anna achieved anything close to this cost savings I’d think that they would be prime picking for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.
At this point, if Cuil can demonstrate an up-to-date index that scales to Google’s level at 1/10th the cost, then I’d think Google or others would start taking a look at them.
Based on what (little) I know about Anna and Tom, it seems to me that their strengths are in the area of architecture and index. Anna is all about the index, she built Archive.org’s index, then went to Google and built the TeraGoogle index, now it’s the Cuil index. What people seem to be missing is that there’s a big difference between the index and the ranking system. Without a competative ranking system Cuil can not compete (IMO), but they can add huge value to Google if they can reduce their web index to 1/10th, 1/5th, of it’s current size. The cost savings in power alone would pay huge dividends I suspect.
Update:
I just came across this article from PC Magazine in which Anna Patterson claims that Cuil will index over 120 billion webpages compared to Google’s 40 billion pages. I wasn’t aware until now that Google only indexed about 1/3rd of the total web pages on the internet, which is interesting at one level, but if Cuil was able to index 120 billion pages and keep them up to date (more importantly) and at 1/10th the cost… then I see true value in what Cuil has accomplished.
