On July 28, 2008, I wrote the following about cuil:
Is cuil Name for New Search Engine Cool Enough?
Also on July 28, 2008 highly esteemed and well respected industry technology expert John C. Dvorak wrote the following in PCMagazine Online about cuil:
The New Cuil Search Engine Sucks
I thank John C. Dvorak for his valuable insight, stunning perfection, impeccable prose, usual accuracy, verbal economy, on-line alacrity, understanding of what we need and most of all for agreeing with me.
Copyright ©2008 DM Jackson - WebMarket West - All Rights Reserved.
Published by dj //
Limping into the Search Engine arena yesterday, new Search Engine cuil, pronounced cool, launched to much fanfare, sporadic outages and intermittent pages announcing that their, “servers are running a bit hot right now.”
Boasting 120 billion indexed pages, the cuil leadership team consisting of expatriate Google workers, Anna Patterson, Russel Power, Tom Costello and Louis Monier, promise Internet users that if big is Google then huge is cuil. However, initial criticism from well respected experts like Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land along with glow in the dark servers indicate this remains to be seen. In addition to hot servers, which are not cool, cuil has other features that may take some time for us to warm up to.
Call me quaint or call me simple, but when I enter the name of my own company in a search box, I really do prefer to see it pop-up as the top listing on the results page instead of listings for DUI Lawyers, Dubai real estate or what have you. Funny thing is, quaint or simple, so do all of my Search Engine Marketing clients… all of ‘em!
At least for now, this is going to be a real hard sell for the Search Marketing crowd. How does one respond to a corporate or professional client when cuil with their zippy state of the art Search Engine technology has a new algorithm that relates them to cabbages?
Apparently, we are not alone in placing value on accuracy over quantity. Numerous comments by those that have actually been able to get cuil search results have been unimpressive, to say the least. Our own test searches in what cuil executives tout as the world’s biggest index returned results that can best be described in polite terms as bizarre. Instead of seeing a typical list of related pages similar to those generated by MSN, Yahoo or Google, the too-cool cuil returns a non sequitur search train wreck that could pass for randomness at first glance. To fix this, cuil offers you, “helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want.”
Beats me how this is ever gonna be better than Google’s get it right the first time philosophy.
Copyright ©2008 DM Jackson - WebMarket West - All Rights Reserved.
Published by dj //
Mountain View California based Google is apparently willing to share even more information than previously regarding what the curious are searching for by providing a list of the 100 hottest topics queried on the Internet’s leading search engine. Available now, the new Hot Trends rankings reveal day-to-day information on the hottest search terms that Google has been providing Internet searchers.
Referring to the Google Trends project he worked on, Amit Patel, a Google software engineer said, “It’s very entertaining and it’s very addictive.” Of course, Search Engine Marketing specialists may desire more than entertainment or to feed an addiction when perusing the daily trends of Google searchers.
A word of caution here, although Google claims that the improvements will enable users to analyze search terms within sub-regions, the results are edited. That said, here’s the link to Google Trends and here’s one for the new Hot Trends Top 100
Published by dj //
According to a story this morning in the New York Post, Microsoft Corporation may be crafting a $50 billion dollar deal to buy it’s sometimes ally and ofttimes competitor, Yahoo. Although the Wall Street Journal quickly reported that the discussion between the two leviathan corporations are in very preliminary stages, a merger may be likely, regardless of the speculative nature of this morning’s news.
Various Internet pundits have chimed-in on this most recent mega-merger. Some claim that this is a natural paring to be expected as jockeying for top position in the Internet Search industry continues. Others see it as a bad marriage of two terribly mismatched corporate cultures, one highly focused on the Internet and the other highly focused on buying anyone that they can’t outmaneuver. One thing is for sure, combining these two still puts them in second place relative to the gargantuan search company, Google Corporation.
If anyone remembers that this past March, Microsoft’s Chief of Search Technology, Christopher Payne, announced his resignation and departure to pursue, “other interests”, then the pride of Redmond’s move may be seen by some as, “to be expected”. However, I don’t recall hearing about anyone hanging a “For Sale” sign on Jerry Yang’s or David Filo’s front door as some Internet visionaries seem to imply. Further, if this should come to pass, what’s next? Are we heading toward only one Really Big Search Engine (RBSE), with only one set of results?
Welcome to Web 3.0 aka., the “OnlyNet”
© 2007 DM Jackson - All rights reserved
Published by dj //
Over the years, biographers, journalists, contemporary “big thinkers” and writers like me have commented on the incredible genius of the renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. How did he do it? What made him tick? Was he from another planet or from another time?
In addition to the “Theory of Relativity”, he left the rest of us a wonderful legacy of thought provoking and memorable statements. You can find books, t-shirts and even web sites full of his sayings. I have a t-shirt that has a picture of Einstein sticking his tongue out with the saying, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” While this is one of my favorite Einstein quotes, there are others.
Einstein has been quoted as saying, “Genius is ninety percent sweat.” Like everything else about relativity, this applies to everything else, even the Internet! It’s important to remember because for the most part, those halcyon days of seemingly genius ideas leading to nearly instant on-line success are mostly over. Sweat is what you must do in order to become an Internet genius nowadays. That is of course, if you really want to succeed.
Published by dj //
Chris Payne, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Live Search initiative, is leaving the company to, “pursue other interests”. Although a Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment and Mr. Payne was not available, it is doubtful that his departure will be lamented.
Microsoft’s search site has performed poorly under Payne’s leadership, loosing market share since the company launched its highly touted Search Engine, early in 2005. This attempt to challenge the leviathan in search, Google, while noble in its intent to provide the Internet with an additional choice in search results, has netted Redmond pretty close to nothing at the moment.
Payne went on record in a 2006 interview with the Seattle Post Intelligencer acknowledging that Microsoft needed to show a significant improvement in it’s search market share. He was quoted as saying, “I’m hoping this does turn it around,” and, “We believe that it’s still very early in search… that there’s still significant room for differentiation.”
Well, apparently no one in Redmond has sufficient sense of humor to see that the flat growth in search query volume on Microsoft’s Live Search engine has,”turned around” or “significantly differentiated” it while Google and Yahoo search volume have risen by 33 percent and 22 percent, respectively during the same time period, according to Nielsen NetRatings data.
A replacement has not yet been announced.
Published by dj //
