Cuil finally launches. They are my “favorite” search engine startup because of this:
Much of the secret sauce of Cuil is in the way they index the web and handle actual queries by users. Both are costly to scale, and Cuil claims to have found a way to massively reduce those costs. That allows them to run the search engine a lot cheaper, even at Google-scale should it ever reach that point. By some estimates, Google spends a billion dollars a year to run the back end infrastructure of it’s search business.
Just made it my default search engine in Firefox to test it out in a real Jonathan scenario. The one thing I can’t get over is their 3 column layout, since I am too accustomed to the Google format and colors.
So far I get a lot of “Not found” type results. One example is this search for “capistrano for mediatemple dv” which got this while Google got this where result 7 was exactly what I was looking for.
The whole idea of cheap and innovative indexing sounds great, but it still needs to work. I will still give a try for a few more days.
Note: I think that Powerset is the biggest and dumbest waste of money since I originally read about it.
(Via TechCrunch.)
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