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. ...
Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Business blog, Innovation Insights.