Cuill, a stealth search engine company we first covered in September, has raised $25M in a Series B round led by Madrone Capital Partners and joined by Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners.
Not a whole lot is known about Cuill except that it apparently can index the web at 1/10th the cost of Google. The startup was founded by search experts, two of which came from Google. It has been rumored that Google itself has looked at acquiring Cuill even before it launches.
We previously heard from sources that Cuill had raised $4M in a Series A round from Greylock Partners. That wasn’t exactly true - it had raised $8M from both Greylock and Tugboat. That raises Cuill’s total to at least $33M, with another $5M maybe from self-funding.
Google loses 50% marketshare in 6 months, goog stock plunges to less than $80/share…
Google wants to acquire them before they launch – after two of the key execs just left Google?
What if Google could foster this kind of innovation in house – compensating people like Anna and Russell at levels that would induce them to innovate inside the organization?
“Not a whole lot is known about Cuill except that it apparently can index the web at 1/10th the cost of Google.”
Not sure this is ‘known’ exactly yet, but if so. they’ll be on track to maybe one day be within an order of magnitude or two as efficient as Gigablast. On the other hand Gigablast just plugs away on making things work instead of new rounds of funding. How boring.
I love that the side effect of being efficient is that GB is positioning themselves as a ‘green’ search, using 1/50,000 the resources of a search at Google. C’mon, let’s save this earth, folks.
How’s business there at Gigablast, Morgan?
Yeah cheaper does not mean better there will always be some one that can do it cheaper it is all about quality….check it out at http://www.clowcash.com
It would be strange indeed if Google turned into some kind of weird revolving door company - leave google to start a company, get bought by google, leave to start a company, get bought, leave to start a company…
I am really eager to know how they are going to achieve this feat. This can’t be about just fine-tuning some parameters or simply buying cheaper hardware or anything like that. This has to be a tremendous improvement in indexing algorithms.
However, increasing the efficiency of indexing algorithms is limited by the number of documents and the number of tokens (i.e. strings delimited by spaces) to index. If there are n tokens on the Web you basically have a threshold of O(n), below which you can only go if you do without some of the information.
#6, revolving door was exactly how Cisco operated in the late 1990s. They will acquire, the execs will leave and start again. There have been entrepreneurs who sold companies to Cisco 3 times.
So what is happening at Google isn’t unprecedented.
They can index the web at 1/10th the cost of Google because their spiders are so over-eager that they eventually get banned. By the time Cuill launches they probably won’t have access to a large portion of the internet.
They really need to learn how to properly throttle their spiders…
Anyone heard when Cuill is launching?
Sometime is hard to innovate from within. There are all sort of elements that prevent that from happening. So, having execs leave to start new companies and then get bought by the original company is akin to generating innovation from within. The purchase price is the bonus - or what the founders get after the investors. In any case … think about it. It is a inexpensive way to innovate because somebody else gets to pay for it. If it works … Google wins. If it does not work … then no skin off their nose. It also bypasses all the internal political BS.
Smart.
The Internet age has just begun. Welcome improvements is always good. I really hope they will deliver as they claim. It should be interesting to see if Google snaps them up for $50 billion or they go solo and earn that in a few years.
Getting market share from Google will be a huge challenge. maybe MSN will spill out the billions? It is an open game.
This is kinda interesting, search isn’t really a new problem, and im sure that if there was a cool new way to improve on it, it would already be known.
It is too bad that the relationship wasen’t more along the lines of Doug Cutting / Yahoo with Lucene. Kinda like what Brady said.
I LOVE THESE GUYS! cant wait to use it!!
Now that is some senior managment!
glad to see the usual collection of moronic pie-in-the-sky comments from the drechcrunch crowd.
oh yeah, i have a plan for crawling the web for 1/10 the cost…i host my servers in kuwait or saudi arabia who are eager to be seen as tech-wannabes…they just underwrite the other 90% out of a sovereign fund!
remember powerset children? wearing your bullshit detector is going to be vital for 08-09.