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Building Web applications that are robust and perform well is hard, but trying to promote them, build a market for them, and then make money from them is far harder. And harder still is when you're launching a Web service that competes with an established brand in the same market.
Could anything be harder than that? Well, yes, that's what launching a Web service that competes with Google is and exactly what Cuil attempted when they went live on July 28.
Cuil (pronounced "cool") was created by ex-Google and ex-IBM employees with a $33 million venture capital investment. It's goal was to out-Google Google with an index that the company implied made it the biggest available (they claimed 120 billion pages, but as Google no longer publishes the size of its index it is hard to verify the claim).
As many commentators have pointed out this is a curious thing for Cuil to focus on as what matters, as we will revisit in a moment, is not the number of results but their relevancy - we want to spend less time looking for stuff and returning more results doesn't help.
Another key marketing differentiator was that Cuil stated it does not retain any personally identifiable information at all, an issue that Google has been criticized for. If they loose a point on the size issue...