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

Short piece on the Long Tail

The Long Tail How endless choice is creating unlimited demand. Chris Anderson

Back in 2006 Chris Anderson wrote The Long Tail - a history of the 'hit', a definition of the Long Tail, a look at the businesses already taking advantage of it and some predictions about the future effects of the Long Tail.

If you haven't come across the term before, here's a brief explanation.

Hit lists have been around for decades. Marketing focus has traditionally been on the big hits. That's where the volume and the money is. Well, that's where it was.
There will always be top ten listings and somebody has to come first. But today, the front runners aren't packing quite the punch they once did. And the expertise involved in creating, picking and promoting hits is increasingly redundant.

Today, the internet has largely removed geography and the physical storage of inventory from the equation while at the same time introducing even greater levels of choice. Brands still fight for shelf space on retailers shelves, but retailers on the internet have no concerns about the size of their inventory. They don't have to worry about the likely popularity of an individual line based on the size of their real-world cachement area or the physical limits of their expensive high street retail space. Global reach has made niche offerings that couldn't be supported within a physical location suddenly significant.

Six major themes emerge from the book:
1 In any sector, there are more niche goods/services than 'hits'.
2 The cost of accessing these niches has fallen dramatically.
3 Massive choice needs filtering to make sense of it all.
4 With expanded choice and granular search, the niche becomes more popular than the mainstream. All the niches adds up to more than all the hits.
5 Real demand is made transparent without being hidden behind artificial scarcity brought about by lack of information, shelfspace or distribution problems.

It's a quick and easy read and all the more powerful for that. Highly recommended. Just click on the link at the top of the post to buy it from Amazon.

But what if you aren't a web retailer with a vast virtual inventory? What if you are simply promoting a service through your web site? Well the Long Tail effect will still be evident. The distribution curve of the terms used to find your site will probably show that your top ten terms account for less than 20% of all search driven visits to your site. And if they count for more than 30% then you are almost certainly missing out on your fair share of niche traffic.