The Cuil Search Engine Petrie Dish.
by Chuck Kisselburg
of ICANNWiki.org
In my morning read I ran across the following article that announces the debut of “Cuil”, a new search engine.
The creator of this search engine, Anna Patterson, is no stranger to search engines as she once had a search engine company that was apparently impressive enough for Google to purchase in 2004 to upgrade their own system.
After working at Google for a while, she and a couple of Google’s engineers left Google to create another search engine that is to better Google.
So I headed over to “Cuil” to check it out. I proceeded to do a VERY scientific number of searches to arrive at an authoritative opinion. (ok, ok, so I did a couple of searches…..)
True, I tried my test search of “Bill Chase”, the founder and leader of my first favorite rock band back in the 70s before Bill and most of his band, “Chase” were killed in a plane crash in 1974 – hence a somewhat obscure search. I was amazed by the content delivered and the speed was amazing!
True, Cuil has a way to go, but impressive none-the-less.
However, while doing other searches I found things don’t rank like you typically find on Google or Yahoo. This lead me to realize that what we find today, through searches on Google and Yahoo, are what has developed over time. By time I am referring to ranking based upon change, thus relevance.
So what might this mean for those organizations who have worked to ensure higher placement? How long will it take for sites, or pages, to once again rank higher? Does a new search engine mean a new way of search engine optimization? How should an “optimizer” approach Cuil differently than Google? For that matter, how should an optimizer approach Cuil differently than Yahoo? Another way of looking at this is while a site may have accrued a lot of “Google Juice” or “Yahoo Juice”, what does it take to accrue an equal amount of “Cuil Juice”?
With that said, what impact will this have on businesses who work with optimization specialists to rank high to bring in the proverbial “eye balls”? Same with those in the domaining community.
True, Yahoo and Google are not going away ANYTIME soon. OPPORTUNITY? The opportunity I see with Cuil is how often do we have a search engine “petrie dish” to examine and watch how sites initially as well as evolve in rank? How cuil is that?!!!!
Add comment July 28th, 2008