Cuil's Dangerous Strategy
An article in the Wall Street Journal today described how a startup company called Cuil Inc. has assembled a “dream team” of engineers to try to dethrone Google Inc. Odds are that Cuil (pronounced "cool") ends up like the seemingly unbeatable team of NBA players that finished sixth in the 2002 FIBA world championships.
Cuil’s search engine launched today. It claims to cover three times the number of Web pages that Google covers (in trial runs this morning it ran very slowly and found nothing under my name!), and displays its results like a magazine. President and co-founder Anna Patterson, an engineer who helped build Google’s search index, told the Journal, "You can't be an alternative search engine and smaller. You have to be an alternative and bigger."
To top Google, Cuil built a top-flight team of engineers with search experience at eBay, IBM, AltaVista, and, of course, Google. It is backed with more than $30 million of venture capital.
Cuil is playing a dangerous game. Clayton Christensen’s research found that entrants almost always fail when they try to leapfrog over current competition by playing today’s game better. Incumbents have the skills, resources, and motivation to defend against these “sustaining” attacks.
If Cuil’s search technology does indeed work better than Google’s, you can be sure that Google will be fiercely motivated to fight back. With all the engineering talent at its disposal, it is hard to believe Google won’t win that battle.
Perhaps Cuil’s goal is to be acquired by Google, in which case it might not care about its long-term success. If it really does hope to ultimately best Google, it better have a disruptive card up its sleeves. My next post will see if lessons from “anomalies” to the pattern of entrants losing sustaining battles could help Cuil plot a path to success.
Click here to read Cuil's Dangerous Strategy Part II: Is There Hope?
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Scott D. Anthony is the president of Innosight, an innovation consulting and investing company with offices in Massachusetts, Singapore, and India. He has consulted to Fortune 500 and start-up companies in a wide range of industries. During 2005–2006 he spearheaded a yearlong project to help the newspaper industry grapple with industry transformation (Newspaper Next).
Comments
A new search engine created by Google people to compete with Google in hopes of being purchased by Google?
That rings funny to me.
Thanks for the news on Cuil (is it just me or is it awkward to "pronounce"? Doesn't sound "Cool" to me).
- Posted by Alphonse Ha
July 29, 2008 9:51 AM
If I remember correctly, one of the messages in Art of War was "don't attack a stronger enemy head to head" :-)
The only communicated advantage is the number of indexed pages. That means nothing to me, since the search results lack relevancy from my first observations.
- Posted by Pepa
July 30, 2008 7:52 AM
Scott
I see this on two levels. On the strategic level, Cuil claim 4 main differentials:
1 A bigger index.
2 They present search research results in a 3 column, magazine-like format.
3 They rank sites by analysing page content, rather than the link based Page rank method.
4 They do not record data on personal surfing habits - a security concern.
Whether this combination will win them search traffic or not is hard to foretell, but it does seems to be more than playing todays game better.
On a second level, the search engine world is so full of disinformation, it would make Jo Goebbles head spin. It is not clear what Cuil would have to gain by giving too much away this early, so item 2 above is the only element that we know to be true.
- Posted by Mark McCormack
July 30, 2008 2:34 PM