picking a fight
Is it better to compete in an industry dominated by a single corporation, or a market full of inconsequential competitors? What if that single competitor is so well established that they're a now a verb? Maybe have an entire market named after themselves?
IBM, a name once synonymous with personal computers no longer has a PC division. In 2005 they sold it to a Chinese corporation. When I xerox a document, I usually use a copier made by Ricoh or Brother. I do use Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages, but only because they continue to innovate—Side note: if you haven't tried Band-Aid Advanced Healing, they will change your life. So does any search stand a chance against Google at this point? After all, you never "Live Search" or "Yahoo!" anything…
I guess my point is that at some point someone had the audacity to challenge the companies who defined the market. It takes guts to pick a fight with the biggest kid on the playground. But if you never fight the fight, you're guaranteed to lose.
Good luck, Cuil, you're going to need it.
Comments
I don't get the big deal about Cuil. They have their results organized into a grid instead of a list and they supposedly have a pretty big index, but there is nothing about them that has innovated or made me want to change. They probably just indexed sites by doing Google searches anyway.
Come to think of it, I don't get most companies attempts to compete with the big dogs. Like all the wanna-be iPods out there. Some of them have FM tuners and whatnot, but none of them compete on the one thing that will actually get people to buy it: price.
They don't have a firefox search box plugin. When they act like a real search engine I'll give side by side try.
So they have a reversed contrast scheme as opposed to google. And the privacy policy seems to be the big draw. Most people don't know or care enough to be interested by the policy, but it's interesting considering the YouTube records grab and the civil rights decimation by the current administration.