Cuil.com launched last night to tremendous fanfare. Most people are focused on the relevancy of search results, but to me the big story here is the cost effective indexing.
Google is so entrenched because it has virtually no competition aside from Yahoo and Microsoft (with Ask, Snap and a few Sequoia backed startups sprinkled in). This is mostly because the cost of indexing produces a very high barrier to entry and only a handful of players can even think about playing in the space. Just think of what happened to Powerset, they built some cool stuff but couldn’t do anything aside from M&A because of the high cost of indexing enough of the web.
So if Cuil really did find a way to bring the cost of indexing way down, I hope they become the index provider/backbone to other search startups. If they do this, then all of a sudden one big barrier to entry crumbles and tons of competition in the search space becomes a possibility. Competition = innovation.
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