I'm sorry, I didn't mean to claim that it was easy to make a truly well-functioning search engine (i.e. Google). More that it's pretty easy to index a bunch of pages and return non-relevant results. While scaling is not a trivial problem, $33mm in capital should be enough to buy the expertise required to solve it. It's not a problem that hasn't been solved before. Of course Cuil might one day be better than Google, just like Company X might one day be better than Google.

The point is that they aren't there today so it is completely bizarre in my mind that they would come out guns-a-blazin' with these huge claims. How do we even know that they have a faster index generator than Google? What does this self-reported 130 billion page number even mean? Just that they have downloaded that many pages? It doesn't seem like they have indexed them all, properly anyway.