Kansas City SEO and SEM

by:Anne Haynes

A client called me today and asked me if I’d heard of Cuil the new search engine created by ex Google engineers that claims to be better, faster and cheaper than Google. While I was taken off guard because I was clueless about Cuil (how embarrassing), I was curious if this new search engine would become the next NUMBER 1 search engine. So, I decided to conduct some research and a quick test.

Cuil Goal located on the website states, “The Internet is getting bigger and more disorganized every day. Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.”

The Cuil Internet Information Philosophy:
Size matters
Popularity is useful, but not always important
Organization is fundamental
Cuil analyzes the Web, not its users

Based on the philosophy alone it looks like Cuil could be the ideal place for researchers and students to find different information that is unbiased to Google’s popularity filter. It will be interesting to learn more about how Cuil ranks websites and what it takes to get in position one.

As my first test, I used my name as a search term because I study “Anne Haynes” regularly. While the amazing 13,305,408 indexed pages using the term Anne Haynes was impressive, how was the quality on the first page. As we all know the first page means everything and capturing the end-user within seconds is essential to a successful search engine.

If you’re interested in seeing a picture here are Anne Haynes results in Cuil But let me tell you there really isn’t much there….three of the top results were from my VMIX account and 100% of those results were displaying pages that no longer exists. The images that are embedded within the results, while very cool or Cuil, they do not correspond with the pages being displayed. I find it interesting that VMIX is all over the first page for a few reasons; one I know the founders and the lead engineer [shout out to Greg, Ed and Ian], and two, I created that account last year and haven’t logged in for several months. Why is VMIX tied to Anne Haynes in Cuil’s eyes? I don’t know that’s for the geniuses over at Cuil to figure out. It will be interesting to watch this search engine, plus it will be nice having something else to play with besides Google. As a SEOer, it’s time to read about the engine and learn its likes and dislikes – in the hopes that “If” Cuil is the next NUMBER 1 search engine, I’ll have an advantage and so will my clients.

Check out Cuil.com.