Rumble in the cloud - the web is open!

If you haven't been living under a rock for the last week or so, you have probably heard about the search engine Cuil and its rocky start into the online world. You might have even heard of Yuil -- a visual lookalike that used the Yahoo BOSS APIs to deliver significantly better results with the same layout. But were you aware that this whole thing was written on Google App Engine?

Before everyone out there starts crying HuddleChat, I'd like to point out that the authors have undertaken a major effort to redesign the site to make it look less "cuil-ish". They even thought of the branding and renamed it from "yuil" to "4hoursearch". Why 4hoursearch? Well, let's ask the authors:

It took 4 hours to write the initial code, 4 hours for it to go from unknown to 20 hits / second, 4 hours looking for a domain name and 4 hours to build the brand new UI. Fortunately, it won’t take 4 hours to find something with it

So, why would I (who doesn't even personally work in search) care enough to blog about this? For a couple of simple reasons:

1. Not only did the authors "claim" that doing the port was easy, they also provide the proof: you can download the source code and study it. It is a beautiful little piece of code. I probably couldn't have done it in this timeframe, but I can see how someone familiar with the APIs could. Kudos to the engineering work!
2. From the first launch of App Engine on, there has been a lot of discussion on the matter of lock in and whether using this environment would force developers to do it the "Google way" and never be able to switch to another platform. 4hoursearch is a great example on how pieces in the cloud can be woven together, interact and enhance each other. This service is using Google infrastructure to perform Yahoo searches -- how more open could the cloud be?!?
   
3. When I originally started this blog, I wanted to focus on how App Engine can be used to develop commercially successful apps with little rampup time or cost. Now, I might have strayed from that path a little bit, but this opportunity is just too good to pass up. If this would not have been a Yahoo executive but a regular garage startup guy, he or she could have promoted the heck out of this and make good money just through ad revenue. Instead, lots of little cookiecutter enterpreneurs now have a perfect template for building their own search engines -- it will be interesting to see how they will make use of it.

Well, so much for this week's post -- time to get out of the virtual cloud and catch a few more rays of the warm California sun! If you are interested to learn more about open standards and how they are be used to keep the web open, you might want to check out the Open Web Foundation.