The OC's point was that Google didn't and shouldn't have responded to Cuil, Wolfram Alpha or Search Wikia because they were only covered by small tech blogs. Both are wrong and them flaming out doesn't prove his point.
They flamed out because they weren't sticky with users, but it wasn't for lack of original coverage or eyeballs. IIRC, Cuil managed to get covered in pretty much every major news outlet, which converted into about 3M uniques on their first day! As I alluded to in the post (and better described in the posts I linked to), Google did their best to take the wind out of their sales with timely released and announced features (longer snippets, bigger index, in this case).
In retrospect, it seems that they were going to (at least initially) fail on their own, but Google didn't know that at the time. And the point is that they were paying attention and responding. They took the competitive threat seriously, as I think they should.
They flamed out because they weren't sticky with users, but it wasn't for lack of original coverage or eyeballs. IIRC, Cuil managed to get covered in pretty much every major news outlet, which converted into about 3M uniques on their first day! As I alluded to in the post (and better described in the posts I linked to), Google did their best to take the wind out of their sales with timely released and announced features (longer snippets, bigger index, in this case).
In retrospect, it seems that they were going to (at least initially) fail on their own, but Google didn't know that at the time. And the point is that they were paying attention and responding. They took the competitive threat seriously, as I think they should.