Note: Opinions expressed here are my own, and not that of my employer, Cuil.
Google is full of creative, smart, and innovative people, but above all else, they are a fantastic PR machine. Sometimes it’s because of a carefully executed PR plan; sometimes it’s just because they are such a household name; either way, anything the giant does becomes news.
There is discussion at the moment about Google stealing the up-and-coming competition’s thunder, and I’d be lying if I didn’t feel the same at times. Take Cuil’s recent launch of timelines, followed just a few weeks later with Google’s News Timeline launch, and inclusion of it’s experimental timeline result view into the normal search results days later. We tweaked our related searches to make them better, then Google did the same thing a short time later (there are others doing related searches as well, it’s just a good idea).
But you know what? We get over it.
Competition is good for the industry, and we welcome it from competitors big and small. Google wouldn’t be the successful company it is if they didn’t notice what was going on around them and react accordingly. Any company looking to catch up to Google is doing the exact same thing.
Cuil is largely written off in the press, so we never expect to get the same reaction when launching new features. That’s not going to stop us: we’re going to keep innovating and trying to make discovering information easier and more enjoyable. If Google wants to implement some of our ideas, they can go right ahead – the difference is in the execution, and every search engine needs to learn that ideas are only half the equation. You need to take these ideas and make them into features that average people enjoy using. We try to create a human-focused search engine, easing exploration, instead of being a dull list that amounts to a popularity contest.
We’re not as big as Google yet, but we’re still here, and we’re not going to stop bringing a fresh perspective to search.