I Love The ’08s: Cuil and Beating Google
Wow, man, Cuil, remember Cuil? Those were good times.
Since it’s much hyped release in late July, the “The Google Killer” Cuil has seemingly racked up nothing but a series of ridiculously bad, pun based headlines, a healthy pool of pundit haterade, and the worrying news that the engine’s indexing might be actively killing off websites. There’s been some half-hearted praise that the search engine has been getting better, but the general consensus is that the project has been mostly a failure.
The failure itself isn’t all that interesting (though compared to the much touted failures of the Web 1.0 era, the boom-bust cycle of a few months is way, way shorter than it used to be). Stuff fails all the time. And, as Mashable’s rightly pointed out, the sway of Google is so strong by this juncture that even had Cuil been a better engine, it still would’ve likely failed.
The really interesting new question on the table leftover from Cuil isn’t whether or not context based pictures are important or even whether or not privacy matters in search (an issue largely already raised by, you know, that whole Google-China thing).
The really interesting question is: how do you beat Google?
Google is great since it resolves the data portability problem associated with the proliferation of services that’ve come out of the Web 2.0 boom. Instead of having to keep your things in multiple places with multiple logins, Google provides a single, popular, standardized place to do it all. To that end, Cuil failed since it tried to replicate Google, which was tough since they couldn’t replicate the service advantages of having docs, chat, social networking, and the rest all in one place.
One option that strikes me as likely is someone hitting at some of Google’s real money making centers like advertising. Despite all the data that’s been dug up about me by Google, AdSense still kind of sucks. This is a failure: a really good advertisement isn’t an ad, it’s information. Craigslist is essentially a book of ads, but everyone thinks of it as a useful resource since it directs me to a pool of things I actually want but didn’t previously know about (i.e. sublets, insane personals). It’s an unbelievably tough problem — but there’s room here for someone to develop a new model that can push the percentage of clicks and buys an eensy-bit higher, which could really snag market share and topple the money engines that power the rest of Google’s projects.
There’s a possibility, of course, that the company might just end up beating itself. Entering markets with abandon creates more competitors in every field. And as other companies start entering each arena to compete or adopting Google innovations, Google’s lead in web services might just get reduced, fittingly, by hordes of smaller, more specific businesses in each individual service. This seems to be particularly the case if the widescale adoption/development of Web 2.25 things facilitate easier data portability for users to customize their set of online services in a coherent way.
Then again, there’s always the risk that Google will just shut down the Information Superhighway and hold it ransom in exchange for submission from the developed nations of the world. And I for one welcome our new Google overlords.
I dunno — just throwing around ideas. Any other thoughts on how to topple the Behemoth? Or is that just a Cuil?
