Monday’s buzz about Cuil should ease itself by tomorrow. Cuil, pronounced “cool,” blasted off its press releases and got an excellent response from the media today. It was the “top story” on CNN at 7am PST, and most of the Aussie and European bloggers had already made several posts about it. Surprisingly, even now at 4pm PST, the Wall Street Journal continues to keep it at the top of their online stories…back on CNN it appears Amy Winehouse’s umpteenth admission into a hospital has taken the top spot.
Let’s start with the technical side and how it works. Note:If any part of this paragraph seems to be over your head, just skip to the next one for likes and dislikes. Cuil uses content analysis as its core algorithm, as opposed to Google’s link popularity element. Cuil also claims that it’s not interested in any of the private information that Google records. If it is news to you that Google records your searches as well as other information, you can probably understand why they have the “make no evil” motto, and keep their public image clean with employee massages, pet-friendly offices, and a 24 hour organic-cafeteria.
What is cool about Cuil:
- From PhDs to experience with petabytes, Cuil has brought together a group of very smart ex-Googlers which see a flaw in Google’s results. Competition and innovation is always good for the search industry.
- The web is supposed to grant anonymity to the user. By doing this Cuil’s search results could have greater integrity, but not necessarily greater relevancy.
Not cool:
- Cuil proclaims that it indexes nearly 3 times as much as Google, 120 billion pages. Great, its likely to be a bunch (“bunch” being billions) of pages of junk that should be buried down in the search results anyways. Keep in mind the world of Black Hat SEO tactics and spamming has polluted our information superhighway over the past 10 years.
- Results do not have a clear heiarchy. No # 1, # 2 and so on. Even though Google does not list a numbered rank next to the result, the ability to identify which site is #1makes a user feel comfortable.
- Privacy factor: To be honest, we marketers want as much information as is available about searchers. We want their age, sex, home/office locations, socioeconomic status, education level, favorite color, and pets’ names if its available to us!!
- If they spent all this time preparing for a big launch, how could they blow this first impression with an error like server capacity? That’s junior varsity. Never once have we seen Google’s search function be unavailable. GMail, AdWords and other functions, yes, but Google search has always worked.
Google is laughing.
Can you describe what black hat SEO tactics are. Does this mean they are unethical?
Hi Julie, “black hat” tactics are part of a marketing strategy for webmasters and SEO professionals who are typically looking for short term gains on a search engine. It is believed that their sites are filled with pages that have keywords repeating themselves, and often there are many links found on the page that may lead to no resource of substance. Most of this linking and keyword stuffing is located towards the bottom of the black hat website’s webpage. Meanwhile to the top half is generally still useful for the human user. A good way to think of this strategy is to use it as a “disposable website.” The site is built to temporarily rank well in the search engines, but will soon be identified by the search engine and removed. Describing black hat search as “unethical” depends on the person you ask. To most SEOs with long term goals, yes, they and many other professionals would consider it unethical. However, if you need a site that serves a single purpose and then dies off once its goal is fulfilled, perhaps by having top ranks quickly during a pharmaceutical drug recall, then what may be so unethical about that?
I just tried Cuil and there’s nothing Cool about it. The search is really jumbled. As far as tracking my own website’s results, it is horrible. I typed in the exact name of our company with only one result, and it wasn’t even my website; it just sent me to one of those ‘black hat’ spammer sites. Oh well. . .