Oh, absolutely not. They had no idea, and it wasn't really a thing outside of a few minutes of pranking one engineer visiting us + a bit of photoshopping for fun.
The only ones to ever get in touch about this whole thing was, 1) The Y! corporate blog who wanted us to make a lighthearted a fun write-up about the polar bears, which I cannot seem to find online anymore, and 2) a random local from Trondheim, Norway who sent me quite the angry e-mail telling me that I was single-handedly ruining the tourism business in town with that silly image.
It had all started a bit earlier with a colleague (I assume that's you up there, jkb79 :) pulling the leg of a guy visiting us from the Bangalore office, about the polar bears roaming the streets of Trondheim. We just thought we'd prank him a bit about having more dangerous animals than they did in India. Nothing too serious.
So a few months later I woke up early one morning and saw it had been snowing all night. I made sure to get over to the office before the traffic started ruining the image of barren, desolate place where you could entertain the idea of polar bears roaming the streets, looking for young, fresh engineering meat.
I took a few photos, walked inside, and got busy looking for photos of polar bears that could fit into this idea of upping the Dangerous Wildlife War between India and the home of the proper vikings.
So I did a little bit of photoshopping, uploaded it to my Flickr account, and sent the link to a few other yahoos around the world. We had a bit of fun with it, but I don't think anyone with access to this worldwide web of information will be too fooled. (It's quite easy to figure out that there are no polar bears on the Norwegian mainland, so I've never been too bothered about leaving it up there.)
As a user who frequently opened the AppStore just to browse, discover new apps, and who used to buy a lot, I've just stopped opening the AppStore over the last three-four years. Browsing and discovery has become too hard for me, and I feel like they're pushing games too hard.
I used to buy a lot of games as well, but often I was just in the mood to look for some neat applications. If I could somehow filter out all games and just browse apps across all categories, I might still browse the AppStore regularly and still buy apps (including games, when I'm in the mood for that). The end result now is that they've lost a customer who used to buy new apps every week.
How many queries per second can they handle on those nodes, and with what latency? What kind of relevancy calculations were they able to do at query-time in their system with 1B documents per node? Were they able to support query-time aggregation of structured fields in their documents? Was the index stale or did they support continuous feeding and indexing of new documents? If the latter, how well did they meet their SLA QPS and latency when indexing new documents?
I can set up a single search node and fill it up with God know how many documents any day, but the difference between supporting 10 QPS with ~500ms latency and 3000 QPS with the 99 percentile below 40ms is really more interesting than exactly how many documents I have per node.
Just to confirm your arguments, I'm quoting from from http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article545833.ece:
"Although stretching cable for about 3,000 kilometers from Andoeya to Longyearbyen seems inconvenient, the spot has been carefully chosen. Svalbard Satellite Station (SvalSat) has specialized in retrieving data from satellites in polar orbit..."
And then from http://www.ksat.no/Products/Svalsat.htm:
"The satellite coverage at this latitude holds unique opportunities and SvalSat is the only commercial ground station in the world able to provide all-orbit-support (14 of 14 orbits) to owners and operators of polar orbiting satellites."
I'm looking at the Mozilla example on my laptop without a mouse, and I get a little bit annoyed when I'm hovering a certain node trying to click on it and the visualization keeps on moving and makes it hard to click on it. So maybe it could be possible to have a simple option to freeze the view?
And maybe an easy way of instantly changing to some near optimal viewpoint for viewing the data in terms of a given axis? (Ie. CPU or memory usage).
But this, combined with normal alerts would be cool. Oh, and what about showing trace lines once I've selected a given node? :)
Personally I would have bought it, contacted Steve Jobs directly and right away (not called up Apple's support line, who of course cannot help with this issue), given him the phone without any questions or favors asked, and then just taken my chances that he would remember my publication in favorable light somewhere further down the line.
And as pointed out in the Wikipedia article on GNE: "Occasional signs of this legacy are visible, such as the '.gne' file extension appearing in Flickr's URLs."
Crawling a few million pages, making some sort of searchable index, and building a simple frontend is a nice exercise for anyone, and building a new search engine as such is nothing special.
Getting something up and running that has a good enough coverage of the web, constantly has fresh enough content, is able to catch up on sudden events (ie. Michael Jackson's death) and show relevant content within a maximum of a couple of minutes, is scalable and can handle the load if it becomes popular, has a low enough latency for the end user (a single server in a basement halfway around the world does not do the trick), AND offers something of significance that makes users actually want to change their habits and switch from their current search engine... Now, that's a whole different story.
Especially the last one is tricky. Even though I agree that in theory the cost of switching search engines is pretty close to zero, these habits die hard unless you have something to offer that is obviously much better.
So while Cuil and Powerset got a little bit of IT media attention, I don't think it is fair to say that they actually grabbed that much of Google's market share? And I'm not really sure it is that easy to make a new search engine that will be able to get the market share of ie. Yahoo!, Bing or Ask. Unless you can do most of the things mentioned above AND you have that extra special feature on top that makes everyone stop and stare. (Which then would have to be something the other search engines could not easily implement too and roll out within months :)
Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo!, but these opinions are mine alone.
In some cases you might argue that they have bought less known companies, refactored and rebranded the service, and then used it to go after the marked share of a more known service.
The only ones to ever get in touch about this whole thing was, 1) The Y! corporate blog who wanted us to make a lighthearted a fun write-up about the polar bears, which I cannot seem to find online anymore, and 2) a random local from Trondheim, Norway who sent me quite the angry e-mail telling me that I was single-handedly ruining the tourism business in town with that silly image.