Cuil sounds Cool

Cuil, pronounced Cool, is already the biggest search engine on the web and it only launched a week ago.

It aims to index the whole web and at the time of writing had amassed more than 120 billion web pages - 3 times the number of any other search engine, including Google.

It also sets out to do things differently, going beyond link analysis and traffic ranking to assess the context of each page and the concepts behind each query and organising search results into category groups that aid the searcher in refining their query.

Cuil offers richer and more easily organised results pages with tabbed clarification of your search query, associated imagery and a magazine style layout for easier reading.

It also majors on its respect for the privacy of the searcher and doesn't keep any personally identifiable information on searchers and their search histories.

Inevitably there were a few glitches at launch. I noticed some mismatch between entries and their associated imagery on sites we look after but on the whole found Cuil's approach refreshing. I suspect it's going to give the big three (MSN, Yahoo and Google) serious competition.

"The web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it," says CEO and co-founder Tom Costello. And he should know; his partner in business and life is Anna Patterson. Ms. Patterson is best known for her work at Google, where she was architect of the company's large search index and led a Web page ranking team. Together with Russell Power, also ex Google, they have re-written the rule book in order to allow users to explore the internet more fully and giving searchers access to an increasingly Long Tail.

In spite of launch day jitters, Cuil was able to beat Google in a key metric that measures relevancy of search results: the amount of time a user spends on the site after being referred to by a search engine. Here are the results for the last three days of July:

Search engine average minutes on site:

Cuil 9.65
Google 9.37
yahoo 8.57

You say potato...

... and I say... Maris Piper... spud... mash... yam. On the web, more than anywhere, it's a case of 'one man's meat is another man's offal'; or words to that effect.

Chances are that many of the words your prospects are using to find your product or service are not the same as the ones you use on your web site to describe your business. And if the search engines don't recognise your site for the phrase being searched, then you won't be returned in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Consequently a percentage of your potential traffic will pass you by.

You will of course get some traffic. Everyone does. But are the words and phrases you've chosen the one's that are going to deliver lots of relevant traffic. And if they are terms that people are searching on in abundance, are you going to be fighting your way to the top of the search engine listings in the face of an impossible number of competing sites.

In an ideal world you would want to focus your attention on just those phrases that are searched on in volume and yet provide little in the way of competition from other sites.

Finding the right words to express yourself.

Google Adwords Suggestion Tool is free and a useful starting point for finding alternatives to phrases that naturally spring to mind. And it will give you approximate averages for the previous month as well as longer-term average search volumes. It also gives an indication of 'adword' competition. But this doesn't really help that much in determining keyword targeting for the organic search listings.

For this you'd be better off using something like Wordtracker. It's one of the many tools we use in helping our clients arrive at a useful pool of phrases to build their content around.

The benefit of a service like Wordtracker is that it allows you to measure search volume and organic competition for phrases across a number of search engines so that you can end up with a cluster of phrases for which you will have a good chance of ranking well in the SERPS.

What you do with the words once you have them is another story.