Article is clearly from an earlier era, but it's really cool to see how far we've come and how much more computing power we have available now. There are entire categories of problems that simply don't exist anymore.
She later designed the search engine of Cuil. While Cuil failed, it only cost them about $30 million to do most of what Google does.
It's surprising to me that there aren't search engines from Comcast, AT&T, and Apple. If you have customers, why give up all that ad revenue to Google? Google is paying some big players a lot of money not to do that. They were paying Apple $1 billion a year to be the default on Apple products. Apple switched from Google to Bing anyway.
While Cuil failed, it only cost them about $30 million to do most of what Google does.
They raised ~$30 million in two rounds, but their valuation was at $200 million by round two. I agree with your point though; the cost to develop a good search engine is dirt cheap compared to the value it brings.
"Valuation" by whom? They had no revenue, no revenue model, no VC would give them additional funding, and Google didn't buy them out. On September 17, 2010 at 1 PM, all the employees were told the company was shutting down.
Google did hire the CEO and Anna Patterson to keep them from doing another search engine.
I really enjoyed that article. I read it over a year ago while I was doing Udacity’s [Intro to Computer Science](https://www.udacity.com/course/cs101) course where you learn to build a web crawler and implement a basic page ranking algorithm.
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=988407
EDIT:
Article is clearly from an earlier era, but it's really cool to see how far we've come and how much more computing power we have available now. There are entire categories of problems that simply don't exist anymore.