skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three major problems that I see right off the bat:

1.) Quality of Search-- In order to be successful, the quality of their search must be at least as good as Google (obviously it much more helpful if it's better). As many have noted, this clearly is not the case right now, and slightly complex queries such as "Linux search and remove multiple files" return zero results.

2.) Revenue Stream-- As noted above, it is going to be difficult for Cuil to break into the search market because they have to achieve such a high quality of search. But even if they are successful breaking into the market, how are they going to generate revenue? An Adsense like program? That's just another thing that they would have to do better then Google, and I just don't see both things happening.

3.) Overcoming Inertia-- Even if Cuil addresses 1 and 2, the moment of inertia of an average Google user is very high. Google has the best web mail available on the market, and along with all the other services Google provides, people will be reluctant to switch their searching to Cuil because everything else that they do will still be through Google.

I don't mean to be negative, and more power to these guys for taking on an area of the web that most people are afraid to even look at. But I guess I would say that if I were to plan a startup, I would probably pick a more advantageous slice of the market (probably one that doesn't exist at the time of planning). At the same time, you have to play your strengths as a programmer, and it seems like thats what the Cuil team is doing.
Why not use PayPal?

Also checkout the Ask YC Archive: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
Of course. But googol isn't the 'expected/intuitive' spelling.
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Interesting, yes, but I don't think a column layout works for a list of search results. It's much harder to scan.
Is Apple becoming Microsoft?
Looks as though as it's closed temporarily:
"We’ll be back soon...

Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.

Thanks for your patience."
Linkbait or not, it's a reminder to mind our knitting -- that is, do the things that make financial sense. Run the business from the customer up, not from the top-down.
Wow It bugs me when people don't really understand technology and development. Especially journalist, they just leave a bad taste and lead people in the wrong direction.

Those who are familiar with the iPhone software 2.0, Its is buggy to say the least, and people I know who are testing the 2.1 are pleased with it. Apparently the battery life is improved. Like most of you I agree, turn of the features you are not using. You really don't need wifi and 3G on at all times, I know its counter intuitive but its a developing technology and it will improve over time (battery life).

Although I am a bit miffed that Apple did not do enough testing and QA on the 2.0 software before launching, I have no doubts that they will fix it.
Interesting. I ran a few keywords through and ...

with http://www.cuil.com/search?q=hacker+news we get an url to this site, good.

with http://www.cuil.com/search?q=hackernews we get a link to pretty what I've put up: eg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2710119622/

with http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil you get no mention of the site itself.

with http://www.cuil.com/search?q=spock you get a peek of how they cuil are structuring more complex searches using drop down menus - bad because it's slower to read & requires a conscious effort to do so.
http://ianab.com/trillion/892949752285.html
think again.
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Awesome examples of CSS code box styling
I'm trying to tweak my TypePad blog to make code examples stand out. I googled for "CSS code box styling" but didn't like anything I found.

What styling tips of examples would you suggest?
I didn't mean the layout so much as that the description of the hit doesn't necessarily come from the text of the page. For instance, the description of kde.org is pulled out of Wikipedia. I'm not sure that approach works, but I think it's an interesting path to flesh out.
This is a classic, but how does it relate to my post? Are you pointing out that a trojan could still be hidden in public code?

If so, I agree. But I think making that code public reduces the risk of it being malicious. Eg, for one you've already made it so that the malware must be implemented as a trojan, rather than being obvious. The other is the code would be under massive scrutiny (hopefully without the developers OKing changes without actually looking at what they do, ala OpenSSL).
It seems they are rather restrictive with their results. I tried it with "what is cuil?" and didn't get a single answer.

Also I don't really expect to get that much improvement from the typical one-shot-editbox searchengines anymore. There's only so much information you can get out of a handful of words (that is unless they start to actually understand the intend of questions and content of pages).

I suppose results could improve if the searchengines would enter a session or dialog after the first try. Some way to make clear that you're still searching the same stuff, only trying other words because the first result haven't been good enough. I think when I fire off several searches in a row far more than half the time the reason is that I'm trying to improve my results. Cuil's categories are a step in that direction.
http://ianab.com/trillion/840689566653.html

UFO :D
no, just click the 'Enter Salon' link on the top right corner.
Because I don't know what algorithms Cuil are using, I can't say at this stage if they are able to deliver better search results than Google without personalization. Perhaps they're better at contextualization for example, and don't need to know what you did last time.

I'm a Python programmer too and the first link I get from Google for 'python' is a Wikipedia article on the Delphic Oracle... Admittedly I have often searched for content relating to Oracle databases!
Why did you choose SliceHost and not i.e. Linode? The latter seems to offer more for the price, and boasts some nice VDS manager and API.
Agreed. As with most things in life there is a hard to define balance to be found.
Read again. You cannot trust code, and making it public is almost irrelevant in this regard. You need the full resources of an "emerging" country, like China, to fully develop your own (e.g. Longsoon).

"Moral

The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."

I would be awfully surprised, if people who made millions (from Verisign) by "looking" at ssl would have made that kind of a mistake (effectively freedom frying the French National Guard).
Tweaking the coefficients is not the same thing as changing the algorithm. Google is no more immune from the Innovator's Dilemma than Microsoft is/was.
Any product that you have to explain to the user how to pronounce will fail.

I looked at the word and my first thought was "how do you say that" - you don't win people over by making them feel stupid.
Google has had a lot of time and resource to index your content. So it is not a fair compariosn yet. Give Cuil time to develop/index and then see the results.

On a side note, Cuil takes forever to load compared to Google, and search results aside, that is a major issue they need to address asap.
"... I'm hoping there's a way to automate it through OO.o. ..."

Try http://search.cpan.org/dist/OpenOffice-OODoc/ and http://search.cpan.org/dist/OpenOffice-OODoc/OODoc/Intro.pod I've had some success parsing Open Office docs & word docs to text. Be prepared to parse XML and read the spec.
WebVan, for example, bought a fleet of Mercs to deliver groceries with. If they'd gone for Fords, they might have survived. OK, not that alone, but they basically spent too much money on things that customers didn't care about and wouldn't pay for.
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Not knowing how much serverload 500 customers represents, it's hard to give an accurate answer.

Overall I haven't been very impressed with EC2, it still seems very experimental to me. For all of the hype about Amazons infrastructure EC2 has had absolutely embarrassing downtimes and outages.

IMO, people need to concentrate on the "E" in EC2, it's elastic and can snap back and bite you in the ass if you're not careful ;)

As a SaaS company, your uptime IS your company. This is doubly true during the early stages when you are trying to get customers to trust you and continue using your service. You HAVE to spend on your architecture, that doesn't have to mean your own private server farm, but you should get your initial webhosting from a company where that product is their primary business, not an experiment.
*"... Have a pleasure of knowing Garrett, his foot once helped bring traffic to my site: http://joe.jaanix.com/22679-nuke-cerenkov-glow :)
..."

Hey Joe thanks for reminding me of jaanix again. I seem to remember it being reviewed in HN a long while ago. Looking at it again the sig/noise is pretty good. Is the site pulling HackerNews from RSS?
I agree with the comments people suggested earlier about coloring - a quick treatment with some schemes found at Kuler, ColorSchemer, ColourLovers - those will help.

"Enter any band whatsoever" doesn't really make sense...

A search for KoRn gave me a bunch of pictures of corn (lol) and the playlist consisted of some guy reading a book to me.

A search for Smashing Pumpkins returns a playlist that doesn't work.

A search for Madonna returns a playlist for Madonna and one for Stevie Wonder (wtf).

After a search, the page is just confusing - there is text everywhere and none of it labelled to tell you what it is. Playlist reference #: Why do I, as an end-user, care about this? I'll never remember Stevie Wonder is 216 - I will remember myplaylist.biz/stevie-wonder though. The free songs available are just thrown over to the side with no label saying what they are (actually, the label saying the # of free songs is way over in the middle - nowhere near this list), plus there is no cosmetic alterations to the text (I've seen some all lower, some all upper).

When viewing a playlist, I think some Ajaxified "framing" would be worthwhile. So the playlist can stay active and doing it's thing, but I could view the information, more playlists, the embed code, etc without leaving the page.

Oh yeah - remove the AdSense, you can throw that in there when you have your design finalized and you people that aren't ad-blind are looking at it. Right now, 90% of us never see Ads (through scripts or habit).

Why should I login/register?

Not a bad idea - definitely needs a new domain, some design work, and some time spent on usability and user experience.
"but you might want to put some <noscript> tags somewhere telling me somethings (like info which seems to be help) don't work without it."

Can you explain what you mean Im lost on this suggestion?
thanks
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Context is always helpful and obviously should be used in addition to personal history and even override it, but if the query has little context, the only context you can get is from the users historical data.

Personalization doesn't guarantee better results but it obviously improves results.
I work in an open-concept room of half-height cubicles where the mean time between interruptions is something like 10 minutes.

We've got developers, artists, and some loud phone-users in the same room. Some of the developers yell at artists across the room to make requests.

Anytime anyone in the room looks at a cool video, or something, a crowd congregates around their desk, and the noise level goes even higher.

To a manager, it looks like the room is abuzz with activity. To the creators whose jobs require concentration, it's hellacious.
No: it's bad design, and it should be eliminated.
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That is simply not true! See Zimbabwe. Not long ago they were a huge exporter of food, the "breadbasket of Africa" everyone called them. Now look at them. Mugabe has brought them to ruin.
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A number of comments.

1. The layout is prehistoric. It harkens to the earliest days of internet design. Lose the global auto centering and create some blocks. Do this on a sketch pad and make as many variation as you can before deciding (see: http://v3.jasonsantamaria.com/archive//2004/05/24/grey_box_m...). Also, if you don't want to actually make borders, ensure the blocks are small enough wrt the text to be well-defined.

2. The pallet chosen is diluted. An easy way to chose pallets is to use a program such as kuler.adobe.com and make an analogous or complementary pallet. Don't make the colors too intense and test them as much as you'd test any other part.

3. The typography runs together. Typography is becoming huge in online design and it's really hard to get right. To learn a bit, I suggest Mark Boulton's "Five Simple Steps" especially steps 4 and 5 (http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five_simple_st...).

4. Keep asking people. When you design something you never have a good idea of how effective it is. Asking people here and elsewhere is an absolute must, so this was definitely a good step.

Hope those help and inspire.
Looks like it hit all of the links on the first page (there are 8x5 boxes = 40) and didn't find anything interesting, so it didn't crawl any deeper. If the second-level pages had more interesting/unique content, I bet it would've kept going.
Weird, I've searched python once or twice (never really used it) in the past, and don't get a Wikipedia article first, I get http://www.python.org, then the whole page is filled with python (programming) results.

I've never really thought about this, but I'm kinda glad Google logs my results, it helps me out tons by giving me results I want. Plus thier motto is "Don't be Evil"...
I'm not saying that's not true, just that Cuil must believe that they don't need it, and it's too soon to see if they're right.

I do most of my searches on www.msdewey.com anyway :-)
Ok, funny, but Google has indexed only 40 of the pages. Where is the rest?! huh
Certainly, everything can be hacked, but if the code is running on a machine using standard off-the-shelf hardware, and running OpenBSD or another equivalently open *nix distro, and the code is interpreted code running on that machine, using the standard interpreter from that (open) language, then the chances that someone might manage to introduce a hack are heavily reduced, due to the number of eyeballs which can verify that the code is safe.

I agree that you have to look at every element of the chain, but my point is that you can construct such a trusted chain that goes all the way from the hardware to the vote-tallying software. There is still some potential for hackery in the hardware, but that could also be ruled out by designing and implementing some open hardware - a project which, I'm sure, would gather plenty of support from the open source community.
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I just was telling you what in my experience worked best for me.

I worked in game development for many years... from my own studio. Very successful on that, but I started to get bored of that. I wanted to use my brain more. I was selling games for advertising so in a way it was like making online brochures, though they didn't work online (they were developed for trade shows mostly). So I started shifting fields, slowly changing my game dev skills and experience for other field skills and experience. I can say it worked for me in many ways, but it wasn't easy. However, I couldn't think of a better option than that. If game advertising isn't what makes me happy anymore, I shouldn't be working on that anymore. And probably that works for you too.
The playlist listing looks chaotic. Text is scattered all around, and its hard to make sense about the information and controls.

My quick tips:

1) Think of adding a new color for links, now you have bolding but it could be useful to have more contrast on links and less contrast on information

2) Group the information somehow. Make boxes and lines ,even invisible ones(grid design). Eg. Youtube, there is lots of information but everything is in a box and the boxes are lined.

3) Info-text on the frontpage looks kind of bad. Don't ever scale fonts horizontally or vertically.
Would cool.com have been better? :)

http://web.archive.org/web/20061004185947/paulgraham.infogam...
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Not yet. But they may do so later.

I hope they will keep ~ the same market share for years.
Sure, Zimbabwe is a total disaster, but the current food crisis is world-wide: in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Haiti, the Philippines, Egypt. etc. The price of rice has almost tripled in less than two years.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cf...
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You mean, human/fungus hybrids who can survive unprotected on the surface of the Moon or Mars?
An annoying step, but http://bugmenot.com
Here's an epic fail for Cuil:

http://skitch.com/swombat/t6n6/flex-rails-google-search
I've looked pretty closely at EC2 and ended up deciding against it. With any of these services (EC2, AppEngine) you're basically building your system on one big fat single point of failure.

I would rather build up an assortment of disk images pre-configured for the needs of my system's components and then deploy them as needed onto a system that supports them (eg. Slicehost).
thanks. I have made some changes to clear up the info page.
ref the ajax for embed, info etc. good idea, I shall look into that. Fixed the playlist issues ref Smashing Pumpkins, madonna etc, this is all done on the fly automatically, Smashing Pumpkins was out of music and needed a quick refresh, the tagging problem just some random error... and images for korn well these are tagged as such. You should register if you want control over images and music else sys does its best given the search term.
But thanks very much very insightful.
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Just to correct you, we make ethanol, not methanol, from sugar cane. By now, it's proven technology: In my whole life I had, perhaps, two cars that ran on gasoline and could not run on ethanol. The other ten or so all ran on ethanol. My wife has one of the newer "flex-fuel" models that, I joke, can run on anything flammable, while my own car runs on ethanol only.

According to local auto magazines, ethanol running engines last longer and are in general better shape after long-duration tests than gasoline running ones. After having a major engine problem (I was 19 and I pushed it waaaay too hard) I can tell you the blown engine was very neat, with little to no sign of carbon build-up or corrosion. Even after a very unhealthy period of abuse by a then much more adventurous motor sports fan.
you still look @it as a technological problem. It isn't. It is a social (moral) problem, thus cannot be solved by any interpreter, BSD fork (which deceivingly, towards the BIOS pretends to be Windows ;) etc.
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LifeJacketStore? How did that make this list?

Anyone could re-create that business TODAY and make a profit. The market probably isn't big enough to make a living only selling life jackets, but how is that relevant?

On the other hand, Roger Ehrenberg's analysis of the Monitor110 demise is a fantastic post.
Furthermore, by creating a more complex market in which people can more narrowly focus on what they do best, it allows two types of complementary individuals to flourish: builders and maintainers, I'll call them. If someone's true talent lies in building and growing a company from nothing, they're going to be better off if they have some outs like selling it on. Perhaps the 'maintainers' aren't as good at creating something from nothing, but are better at running a big, mature enterprise, and paying careful attention to profitability. Some people (Jobs, Bill Gates), are good at both, but it stands to reason that not everyone has both skill sets.
So... If he's returning his I'll take it. We've been sold out here in SF for 2 weeks.
something tells me a search engine that mimics the /search?q= url of Google isn't so much innovative.

Google results structure is a win. White background is a win.

I think they are solving the wrong problem.
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I search for python pretty regularly on Google. My recent, logged-in, searches for 'python gecko' resulted in a bunch of reptile sellers.
The social problem exists whether or not you have e-voting. It has been solved to a satisfactory level already by having election observers, etc.

One of the cool things about social problems is they don't need exact solutions. If you can solve things for 99.9% or even 99% of the cases, that's considered good enough when it comes to people
Does Google just sort results by relevance or can Knol be irrelevant but still nr1?
(Maybe this type of post is not for hacker news since it is pure discussion).

Knol.

Does Google promise that their search results are always sorted by relevance or would it be ok to list Knol - entries as top results without them actually being so?

I guess since they obv know how to SEO to their own algorhitm they can make Knol have a high PageRank and I guess that would be fine.

Is there anywhere you can read about their stance on this?
Is it independently verified or something(I guess not)?
> At least Apple still makes good computers

Today..... and there was a time that bose made good stuff too.

Apple needs to fire some of their marketers, but companies get addicted to the money they bring in. And it works - in the short term.
This moves reminds me more of Microsoft in the 80s. and then your question becomes, what is it about Microsoft that seems so successful that Google wants to emulate their business model?
Regex? What for? You only need to convert the number in the url to binary, and then 1s are whites, and 0s are blacks.
Thanks a lot for sharing this. Very interesting indeed.
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So far Wikipedia has been beating Knol out on a number of search results, INCLUDING Knol. Seeing sponsored results on the results page, I'm not excluding it from thought, but I'm not saying the pages wont get better rankings later in time.