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henning
Cuill seems noteworthy in that two of the founders are ex-Googlers and all of them seem very smart. "Cuill is a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google's, based on new search architectures and relevance methods."

I can't find anything that indicates whether there's any substance to their claims. Certainly very smart people can do interesting work whose significance they greatly embellish and overestimate (AI researchers in the 70s and 80s).

rms
The logical argument against that seems to be that indexing costs aren't Google's major problem and cheaper indexing wouldn't provide much of a competitive advantage.
chadboyda
Exactly, reducing the indexing cost has little to no impact on the customers, so there is no competitive advantage to using Cuill over Google for searchers. They claim more "relevancy" but there is nothing to support that claim so far, but I'm eagerly awaiting it.

Even better relevancy may not be enough as most people believe current search technology is "good enough". It would have to be very innovative. If nothing else, they're a good acquisition target for an existing search company looking to further reduce costs and increase profits or allocate more resources towards more computationally expensive algorithms (spam filtering, semantics, content targeting, etc.)

henning
Soon there may exist the phenomenon of Google acquiring companies started by ex-Googlers. ;)
wmeredith
Ah, but they did say they can do it faster. If they can survive long enough to catch up and pass Google or Yahoo in terms of sheer numbers of pages indexed, they may have something.

I think if they can index significantly faster, then it's highly likely they'll be bought up by Google or the competition for their indexing tech before anything in mentioned in that first paragraph happens.

chadboyda
Faster? Interesting! I hadn't heard that before. Personally I'm rooting for them, I would love to see some innovation in the search market. Unfortunately I just don't see the consumer benefiting directly much from any of this. I hope they prove me wrong.