Here’s a head scratcher. BusinessWeek named search engine Cuil, which launched prematurely, lost their VP Product and now has near zero traffic, as one of the most successful U.S. startups of 2008.
Why? They say it attracted lots of attention when it launched (true, but it wasn’t positive attention), and they say that Cuil has a larger search index than Google (which doesn’t appear to be true). They miss Cuil’s big possible tech advantage, which is IP on how they handle search queries that may be much cheaper than the way Google and others do it.
BusinessWeek generally has intelligent coverage of startups. This time, they blew it. Cuil may yet live to see success, but 2008 was a bad, bad year for them and they had no place on this list.
Update: In the comments and here BusinessWeek says the list is based on who raised the most venture capital over the last four quarters. But Ning and others aren’t included who raised more.
i want to hire their PR firm!!
Actually, businessweek used Cuil to search for the list of companies and compile their results, which should explain it.
any company that has 33 million invested is a success. and definitely not a startup. they are a startupon.
“you cannot innovate algorithm search. that game is over.” if they are smart they will acquire what they dont have…..”true innovation.”
who knows? nothing i say or do makes any sense.
ChannelLocator.com – watch out
http://mlb.mlb....sp&c_id=mlb
go away
This is just crazy. Really doesnt make sense, especially considering their products sucks and is actually going nowhere.
LOL. This is funny because just today I read another post on TechCrunch which said how sad Cuil was and I couldn’t agree more.
Well thats true because CUIL claims > Search 124,426,951,803 web pages out of which 50%+ are irrelevant search results. They should have tried to first beat smaller SE’s like ask,live.com :p
They sure were successful spinning their PR machine.
me too. Who’s the PR firm. That’s what I call tangible results.
Mike when I saw your Twitter I almost had *forgotten* about Cuil and their 15 seconds of fame. This is another indication of how poorly legacy media understands tech – or perhaps how much spiked nog the writer had when he pulled this story together with deadline looming?
no, bizweek really does a good job of covering SV. something just went wrong here.
OK – maybe revert to the spiked eggnog hypothesis
Have you ever heard of journalists or PR people getting paid to write positive stories?
It happens *every day* — I know “journalists” working for the Washington Post and the NY Times that make a good living because of the ‘extras’ they get.
It is not only cash: they get free meals at very fancy places, expensive clothes and more….
Mike, the sequence that the companies are listed, it makes me think that they were just judged based on amount of VC funding that they received over the past 4 quarters.
In that measure, Cuil was a huge success.
You can fool some of the VC’s some of the time, but you can’t cuil all of the VC’s all of the time… or something like that.
Joe Cheng, do you have their number? My company could use some publicity.
Did we all miss something . @Alex I agree I need there PR companies ph number .
Strange inclusion for sure. But this might be the piece that gets people interested in the product, at least outside our 1%.
That has got to be a massive mistake on their part.
if they had the same “PR” on here as twitter had, they would have been seen as “successful” too.
just my two cents.
BusinessWeek fail…
Fail fail.
Are we about done with the “fail meme”. Seems like 15 minutes have ticked away some time ago.
23-skidoo
No kidding, what a placement for the PR firm – I can’t imagine the editors really thought Cuil was one of the most successful startups of 2008, unless that was a really long list.
It looks like MS&L is their PR firm, which wouldn’t have been my first guess.
They surely have some vested interest in writing about Cuil like this. Just today me and my friends were criticizing Cuil about where it went wrong …. turns our they got the PR bang on target
.
The problem of course is this now could be a self fulfilling prophecy … agreed, I want their PR firm
BusinessWeek sucks – they sure as hell didn’t predict the debacle we are in today – in fact, they participated in the production of the recession we are in by virtue of creating all the “business porn” that high flying businessfolk read on their first class flights.
business week being a joke is nothing new. i remember when they had loic on about what is hot now in 2008 .
Maybe they should sell spots on there no-index list, otherwise the cuil bot will crash your site. If they did pr in house, they should really just retool and do that full-time.
Have to agree with other comments: brilliant PR work. However, total Fail on BusinessWeek’s part.
Cuil isn’t dead yet? I had already been writing a made for TV movie on the life of Cuil…
Huh? I’m pretty sure even the Cuil founders were shocked to see themselves on the list.
2008 was definitely not their year.
wtf
Idiots.
WTF Redux.
Cuil aside, I think this speaks to how ready the press is to hype the next Google-killer. Google is now the company with a target on their back.
Fortunately for them, nobody with a real product has aimed at them… yet. And the media will be a willing accomplice when someone does have something real.
Seconded. A “Google-killer” headline is like PR linkbait…especially if the media can’t identify what might be and what isn’t on their own.
It’s bound to get attention from “Oh no my GOOG stock!” readers, but on this one, I think they missed how incremental the change was…and I don’t think relatively-incremental stuff like CUIL will be enough to overcome a non-vacuum market occupied by Google…it’s like maybe only 0.0001% of searches where there isn’t a good-enough answer in Google’s index, and searches for weird stuff like that usually doesn’t monetize very well anyways, so index size is really not key any more — results relevancy is — and at least TC got that right in it’s launch coverage.
Do you think Cuil will attempt to regain strength again or just sell their IP?
Actually what would have been really funny would be if business week had put the wrong images for the founders.
For example — http://www.cuil...amp;q=arrington
Joke of the year
….
- Chandra
http://www.myjil.com
Holy crap that’s insaaaaaaaane. Cuil was arguably *the worst* startup in 2008. BusinessWeek just lost all credibility in my book.
i though link baiting was for small websites like mine. Business week is just trying to get our attention
oh my god, they cant even make a good engine and now this….Great now what do they expect Michael Arrington to do a love piece he has with payperpost.com . We are def. in a economic recession
As long as you have no deep pockets and no friends in the right places, you just won’t get no BW coverage.
But as I stated yesterday, I still think Quil or Qiul (i just can’t get to correctly remember the name), had experienced founders in terms of product development.
But that just proves that long resumes don’t always equate success, if the product design, launch, and marketing do not meet consumer demands.
Part of failure’s cause; awful back UI background, framed site, (who else in today’s Web still uses frames on their site?), hyped PR product launch, and a hard to spell domain name even though it’s short.
Actually, you are wrong.
We got named Top 25 under 25 Entrepreneurs (http://images.b...epreneurs/9.htm) . We ended up being voted to 3rd place. We know those guys now, but at the time – nobody.
Also, we’re living on Ramen noodles here.
Boris Revsin
Co-Founder & COO
CampusLIVE, Inc
http://www.campuslive.com
There is nothing wrong about living on Ramen noodles. It builds character. Like walking 3 miles to school in a blizzard. Same deal.
testing out this comment system
Hhmm… Nope, just checked. It’s not April Fools day.
This may just be the, *cough*, shot in the arm Cuil needs to get going!
- Curtis
http://ShipItOnTheSide.com – Learn to ship profitable software as a side job.
My blog appeared on top of CNN.com Tech blog linking section, and that sky-rocketed traffic to my blog, more traffic than I’ve ever received in any day or let alone, a month. Ahooooo…!
See http://www.cnn....ting/index.html
I thought it was already April 1
My name is Nick Leiber and I am the small business channel editor for BusinessWeek’s Web site. To put together this slide show, we looked at deals that took place in the four most recent quarters available, from October 2007 to September 2008, based on the MoneyTree report, which uses data from Thomson Reuters. We then reached out to a selection of the companies that raised the most money and profiled them. We explain this in our intro slide: http://images.b..._startups/1.htm
Michael, could you please respond to BW’s explanaition?
Nick, tying ’success’ to dollars raised is a vacuous argument. Success is typically one of 3 things for a startup: revenue, traffic, or an acquisition. Cuil, so far, hasn’t achieved any of the 3.
i agree
Translation:
“It depends on your definition of the word success, we clearly defined success in the first slide.”
Stay tuned for next week when “BusinessWeeks Most Philanthropic of 2009″ includes Wal-Mart, Verizon, Bank of America, Ford, and other large purveyors power and advertising dollars.
I think that article was success in terms of VC investment amount, not actual traction of the business. If you notice its ordered by VC investment $$, not revenue.
In this sense Cuil would be one of the most successful startups of the year – in terms of raising capital.
Quote the article: “We then reached out to a selection of the seed and early-stage companies that raised the most money.”
Oh, ha – just saw the comment above me oops
Strange . . . I searched for the original “Business Week” article on Cuil, and it gave me a hamburger.
Thanks everybody for constructive feedback — fair to disagree. Above Nick Leiber clarified how we selected the companies on the list, but we just posted an extended explanation:
http://www.busi...el_arringt.html
Hey John, thanks for the explanation. But Cuil isn’t anywhere near the biggest VC raiser in the recent period. See Ning, for example, which raised $60 m in April. Why aren’t they on there?
http://www.crun...om/company/ning
Thanks, Michael. We asked the NVCA to search by largest investment in that period for seed- and early-stage companies. I will have to check, but the Ning investment may have been classified as an expansion or later-stage round in their database. (Their definitions are here: https://www.pwc...finitions#stage)
In addition, several companies on our list didn’t respond when we repeatedly tried to contact them (to verify the data and get additional info), so they were left off. Imperfect, perhaps, but we did try to be as rigorous as possible about this.
oof. I’m going to just walk away from this story now out of respect for businessweek.
Wow you managed to turn BW’s sort of idiocy into somewhat apparent professionalism. But whatever methods you used that got Cuil on that list should be tossed.
The title of the article is misleading: “Most successful U.S Startups 2008.” The measure of a startup’s success is not based solely on the amount venture funding it gets. The correct title would be “Best Funded U.S. Startups 2008.”
Mike, you are such a tabloid journalist. The article clearly states this is based on VC data right at the start.
In which case the title of the article is misleading and the report unreliable.
This is the same BusinessWeek that claimed Kevin Rose was “worth” $60 million.
Their credibility died long time ago.
do you think it worths more?
Nirav, at the speed digg is growing now I wouldn’t be surprised if Kevin Rose might be worth considerable more than that very soon.
Digg is not growing.
http://www.goog...m/trends?q=digg
Why is VC funding the basis for determining a good year? Seems to me, a venture with no customers would signal a bad year for the VC providing the funding… Cash flow is a far better measure of success.
Michael,
Thanks for taking up this effort, I questioned the basis of choosing cuil right on 23rd dec. They never did answer, however after a proper blogosphere blaze they are out with answers(unsatisfactory though).
Thanks,
Rohit
PS: I am a big fan of businessweek though
I’d certainly love to like Cuil more. The search box way down on the page and the odd results just bother me.
“Most successful” is actually quite vague. So I can see why BW chose to word it that way.
Hey Cuil is almost Dead. It may be a successful startup, but fail to stand.
Google is still number one, but yahoo and live is growing.
One more thing Microsoft is trying to boost users to Live Search by Giving Rewards.
Search on Live and get Rewards.
Dec 31st last date for registration. hurry Up.
Mike, I’m new here. It seems that Techcrunch focus heavily on US Web 2.0. I think there’re a lot of European and Asian (esp. CJK & Indian) sites worth mentioning.
Techcrunch users’ comments are great (far better than those ‘Answers’ sites, even LinkedIn or the like’s). I’d like to hear more for the other side of the World.
For example, take a look at Asiaonline.net. They’re a bit like Cuil, though supposedly far less than $33M, Japan’s JAIC should have given them enough to dub themselves as “the world’s greatest knowledgebase project” (wow).
Anyway, after browse thru their site, their machine translation obviously poses jokes. This is not their technology’s fault (still far way from Star Trek era) but they shouldn’t try to do too much (with too little).
If you’re interested, I could help feed some info to you some time (I think only Techcrunch editors can draw interesting comments). China web 2.0 is my main interest.
PS I already email this to your email address.
just like how the “best” banks are those who can load up on the most assets, no matter how crappy they are. oops … i think i just hear a crash. way to go BW!
ANyone remembers Search Wikia
when we spoke to Jimmy Wales abt it, he acknowledged that they wont be any big competitor to google in the first few years and thus maintain a low profile, tweaking their product. Perhaps this is what Cuil needs to look at and keep innovating (atleast trying .. $33million afterall)