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.

The Knol edge

This is not a piece about what it takes to become a black cab driver in London. For that you need something like taxiknowledge.

Instead this is about Google's new authoring tool Knol - half way between a blog and a wiki with ultimate control of the content held by the author initiating the piece. It's causing something of a stir in SEO circles as there appears to be some evidence that Google is favouring Knol pages over more established web pages offering the same content. Whether this is just a short term setting of the algorithms to give their fledgling service the best launch, or whether it is a longer term bias on Google's part, one thing is clear - a little bit of Knol edge could go a long way.

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.

How do you rank highly without sacrificing the design of your site?

There is a widely held fear that in order to be visible to search engines you also have to be pretty unappealing to the average human visitor.

Content filled with keyword saturated copy and link text may leave you feeling that the site won't be worth the visit after a Search Engine Optimiser has had his way with it.

But, if you're not in the first three pages of results offered up by a search engine, you're not being seen by many visitors.

Assuming you want visitors to your site and you don't have money to promote your web site through mainstream advertising channels such as television, radio, press and poster campaigns - then Search Engine Optimisation is going to be an issue.

It's been said that a good web site needs to be visually arresting and capture the viewers imagination within 5 seconds or less. And for it to rank well in Search Engine Optimisation terms it has to have the level of content and supporting text of a fairly weighty brochure. Potentially uneasy bedfellows.

Compromise is inevitable but there are many things you can do to minimise any negative effects.

At one level, what it boils down to is less code and more content. Use CSS rather than tables and avoid the exclusively Flash-based homepage.

Missing Link

Much has been written about the lack of importance of reciprocal linking. It's widely put about that Google discounts reciprocal links in it's assessment of relevance. Effectively viewing reciprocal links as a method of implying popularity where none naturally exists.

Not an unreasonable assumption in most instances. Consequently many in-bound links have gone missing from web site's inventories.

That said, if there is real content attached to those reciprocal links then there is some evidence that Google recognises the fact - and rewards accordingly. And one-way inbound text links, using keywords and/or phrases with strong relevance to your core subject will definitely stand your site in good stead.

This has left many concentrating on building strong, one-way, inbound links and focusing on publicity, articles, directories, and other direct methods of building awareness.

However, building relationships (and reciprocal links) with associated but non-competing businesses is a solid route to increased, relevant traffic - and it has the benefit of being search engine independent.

No more worries about beating search engine 'checklists' - simply concentrate on providing good, relevant, content and a network to other good, relevant, content.

That way you're sure to climb to the top of the search engine rankings.