Comments on: Why Cuil is Like Toilet Paper

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

what a story title!

By: jeneane

jeneane — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you for telling me how to pronounce it.

I like the way I search now. And I like Quilted Northern.

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

i know qn very, very well

By: Jeneane

Jeneane — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Currently $13.00 for a 24-roll pack on clearance at Big Lots. A better deal than Cuil. I’m just sayin.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

many people put a lot of effort, money and passion into this product and all you can do is call it Toilet Paper.

For me this kind of behaviour is systematic of the kind of brash thoughtless and irrelevant comment that we see much to much of thee days in blogs from the USA.

I say go Cuil.. go and improve your creation this far you have created something that these side line bloggers can and will never achieve.

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I'd say you are Jason Calacanis but your email doesn't match so I am not sure. It's clear you didn't watch the video because if you did, you'd see that I didn't say the product was like toilet paper. And if you watch the video, you might actually learn something.

Give me a call sometime so we can discuss what I have achieved.

By: triom

triom — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Well stated. I tried it out, wasn’t impressed, and stuck with my old TP brand. This product was hyped way too much….

By: James

James — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Way too overhyped.

Btw, you’d probably be interested in this article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/31/inside_cuil/

By: Jim McCusker

Jim McCusker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.