[benologist]

I think the difference is the attitude is different now - when Cuil launched the world laughed and said nothing could be as good as Google. Almost 3 years later a small, insignificant yet maybe not, number of people are starting to use alternatives.

A good parallel could be Firefox - Internet Explorer was the way to browse the internet, now they're just a way.

If Google wants to be the search engine a decade from now they may have to earn that right all over again.

[chc]

People laughed at Cuil because it was laughably bad, not because nobody is allowed to make a search engine.

[benologist]

Sure it was bad - but was every decision* they ever made so fundamentally wrong that they couldn't possibly have improved? The world wrote them off completely 8 minutes after they launched, and they were a meme like the next day. (* in search, not their ridiculous perks etc)

When I search for online games on DDG I get stuff like this in the first 'page' of results:

- http://onlinegames.innovative-solutions-group.com/

- http://onlinegames.webfreehosting.net/

- http://online--games.com/

Did DDG and Blekko both independently, really stumble upon formulas that beat Google, or are we actually open to the possibility of not using Google for search now?

[chc]

Anything can be improved — but in Cuil's case, yes, it would have required reversing pretty much every decision they made (or at least implementing them on such a different level they would be unrecognizable). It was just breathtakingly ill-advised. DuckDuckGo is more clear about the benefits it offers, modest though they may be, and it follows through on its boasts. And Blekko is just modest all around.

I said at the time and still say that Cuill released a very early stage experiment that still hadn't worked out what it wanted to do and called it a search engine.

[epi0Bauqu]

Thx for the specific example, always very helpful! But in this case, I'm having trouble reproducing. Do you have a region set or something? I'm looking at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=online+games and don't see those domains. I'm not saying the other domains are good :), but I just want to understand what you're seeing. We definitely have a problem right now of over-weighted the domain name in the url.

[benologist]

I'm in latin america (Nicaragua) which might hurt a lot if it's trying to pull localized results from this little corner of the world heh.

http://playtomic.com/ddg.png is what I'm seeing.

Edit:

I'm doing a search from one of my US-based servers and seeing those same sites?

http://playtomic.com/ddg2.png

[epi0Bauqu]

Ahh, thx. Turns out I was the one with the settings set :). Duly noted!

[citricsquid]

Yes, I think it would be laughed at today too.

[epi0Bauqu]

The difference is Matt_Cutts, moultano, nostrademons (Google employees) et al. are all over DDG threads, but weren't on Cuil ones as much, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258737 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255122.

I agree though, that DDG is a blip -- a teeny tiny blip in the search engine market -- so, quite frankly, I'm not sure why they care so much, or at all.

[dschobel]

I think the difference in engagement by those guys is that Cuil was trying to be stealth and downplay the hype of being "google 2.0 by ex-googlers" whereas your marketing has been squarely aimed at them.

[epi0Bauqu]

Intentions aside, Cuil was presented as a "Google killer" to orders of more people than know about DDG. But higher level, I don't think DDG warrants their engagement at all. There are much bigger fish to fry, so-to-speak, and yet I don't see them on all the higher profile search engine stories out there across the Internet.

[benologist]

They care because maybe tomorrow you're not just a tiny blip and they're not as entrenched as they are today. Unlikely? Sure, but it does happen.