Cuil Is Cool But Not Yet Hot

Cuil is the "coolest" new search engine available.

Challengers to Google’s search dominance seem to spring up from time to time with each promising something different from what the Mountain View, California company delivers. Mahalo has tried to present a fresh alternative to the Big G as have Wikiseek, Gigiblast, and a handful of others, but none have seriously threatened Google’s leadership.

Now, a new search engine by the name of Cuil (pronounced Cool) promises to do what others have failed to do, claiming to have three times as many indexed pages as Google. Moreover, unlike Google, Cuil promises to make users’ search private, a subject of increasing concern for people who value confidential web surfing.

Promising to deliver a fresh approach to search with new algorithms based on an entirely new architecture, Cuil claims to index the entire internet, not just a part of it. The company says on their info page:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

My first attempts at using Cuil this morning were rebuffed as I encountered numerous error messages and found broken links on the navigation bar. When I returned later, I was able to successfully enter a few keywords and observe the results. Unlike Google which lists Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in successive order, the results on Cuil were in three columns, making it easy to scan what was returned. In many cases, related photographs were included, something Google does not provide.

Cuil also promises to drill down into the content on a web page, apparently with less emphasis on title tags when returning search results. Of course, you’ll have to experiment with this new search tool to grasp just how differently it works from Google.

Cuil management is made up of former Google employees underscoring that a career with the Big G isn’t for everyone. The husband and wife team of Anna Patterson and Tom Costello head up Cuil who, along with Louse Monier and Russell Power built the application. Cuil is backed by $33 million in venture capital and is based in San Francisco.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge and, interestingly, when you search for the word “cuil” on Cuil the results do not include a link to the search engine.

(Soure: Cuil.com and wire service reports)

Considering Massive Rewrites? Don’t Bother!

Late last month I received a bid request from a company who wanted to increase the amount of content on their website. In their email to me they mentioned that their site was founded in 2000, had about 300 pages indexed by Google, and they believed that there were about 5000 inbound links.

I did  a little research myself and discovered that while the home page had a PageRank of 4, most of the main inner pages were PR3 or PR2, with deeper pages showing up as PR1, PR0, if that. Though PageRank isn’t critically important, I was a bit surprised to find that this site wasn’t ranked as well as it could have been. Checking some of their competitor’s sites I found much better results which had me wondering — what were they doing wrong?

Digging deeper I discovered some problems with the site, mistakes made by a webmaster which needed to be corrected:

• For quite a few internal pages, there wasn’t much linking between other pages on the site. I didn’t find that many outbound links either, but there should have been more links between existing pages on the same URL.

• Some of the internal pages were difficult to find. Likely, when the site was first started, these pages were linked to some other page on the site, but were no longer. Effectively orphaned, these lone internal pages were getting absolutely no benefit from other pages, hence the grayed out Google toolbar ranking.

When I mentioned these matters to the owner, he was surprised. Clearly, when the site was launched in Spring 2000, all of the pages were properly linked. A web designer and writer were hired to put the site together and everything worked fine. However, I did learn that the company — in a bid to save some money — made some changes to the site themselves early in 2003 and again in 2005 whereby content was updated, new pages added, and the design tweaked.

I also learned that the owner was the one who did all of the changes. Ugh.

Anyway, the client had contacted me initially with the purpose to have me rewrite a bunch of pages to bring them up to date. His thinking was that the fresh content would be recognized by the search engines and encourage the “bots” to visit his pages. Though this is true, I mentioned that he could save a whole lot of time (and money) if he added the links in himself and update the content as needed. Each page FTP’d to the internet would invite a crawl from Googlebot provided his site map was up to date.

Naturally, I found out that he didn’t even have a site map in place so I instructed him on how to get one.  I also shared Google’s Webmaster Guidelines link and encourage the client to visit Google Webmaster Tools to add and verify his site and do the same with Yahoo! Site Explorer.

As for me, I’ll be doing some other work for this client, but nothing involving fixing internal problems made by others.  Most times I’d rather have people clean up their own mess and take on fresh work without hassling with old stuff.  Besides, learning from one’s mistakes has its advantages, particularly when you manage your own business.