Cuil New Search Engine – A Google Contender?
In the last week, a new search engine has emerged with the promise of providing the internet-searching public with an alternative to Google and the other big search providers.
The search engine, called cuil (pronounced “cool”) is an old Irish word for knowledge and is the brainchild of a former Google employee, Anna Patterson.
There are some in the industry who claim that cuil could threaten Google but others are very sceptical.
The engine works on the premise that it returns results based on content relevancy to the search criteria. They claim that this results in better search results for the user. They also claim to have indexed more pages than any other search engine on the net, over 120 billion.
Here’s the problems for Cuil as I see them. For one, the fact that they have gone down the content relevancy path is dangerous because it means that for certain three or four word search phrases, such as “neon lighting brisbane”, sites could theoretically keyword spam and get high listings.
Despite Cuil’s line that they weight content relevancy more heavily, in many cases I found that the sites that were ranking well on a search phrase only mentioned that phrase once on their page and weren’t even on that topic.
For a quick comparison, lets use a Google vs Cuil search for ‘neon lighting brisbane.’
In Google:
Of the top ten results (and let’s face it, that’s all that matters), 6 of the 10 were actually sites selling neon lights in Brisbane, one was a wikipedia article on Brisbane Tourism, two were informational sites on neon lights and one was my old article where I used ‘neon lighting brisbane’ as an example just like now.
In Cuil:
Unfortunately, the results were hopeless. There was one result for a blue light disco (not in Brisbane), a broadway musical in Brisbane, a chrysler site, a blog (who mentioned lighting in passing), a mini jukebox, a site selling computer hardware, a film studio, an electrical transformer store, and two news sites.
The Verdict:
Obviously this is just one example, but try your own searches and you’ll see that quite consistently Cuil generates fairly obscure results with little reference to the search topic.
Now I’m not trying to be too harsh on them, it would be very difficult to spring up overnight and upstage Google but they have a long way to go before they’re even playing in the same league.
Location targeting is a must, as is fixing the logo-like images that appear beside results that are either poorly cropped, pixelated or simply of no relevance to the site they are beside.
But users would probably put up with some of these drawbacks (at least for a while) if Cuil generated more relevant results than Google. However, they don’t really get close.
Don’t write them off just yet, the layout and design is quite nice, but underneath it all you just feel like there isn’t the guts that Google has.
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Read MoreGoogle AdWords – How to Make the Most of Your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
Whilst organic search engine optimisation will get you so far, it does have its limits. This is mainly due to the fact that when it comes to organic SEO, it is not possible to optimise for every keyword you want to generate results for. Attempting to optimise for ridiculous numbers of keywords is more than likely going to get you blacklisted from Google, and once this happens you really are in a whole world of pain.
So the best option for increasing your reach through search engines is to plunge into the world of search engine marketing through pay-per-click programs such as Google AdWords. Pay-per-click programs allow you to design the four-lined ads you see above and to the right of search results.
But designing your ads is not as simple as it seems. It’s not just a matter of slapping together a promotional piece and waiting for the sales to come rolling in. Google have strict editorial guidelines that govern the use of punctuation, superlatives and displayed URLs. Plus there’s also the trick of using the right kinds of messages that are going to work in a search engine environment. The word chains that you use for your search engine advertisements are vastly different to the messages you would use in more traditional marketing mediums. This is where it becomes important to ensure that your ads are:
- In line with Google’s editorial policy;
- Utilising the kinds of messages that search engine users are looking for;
- Pulling the right kinds of users to your site; and most importantly
- Generating you sales.
But designing the ads is just the first step. Once your ad designs have been created, you need to specify how much per click you are willing to pay as well as listing the keywords you wish to target.
You might be thinking that this is a straightforward budgeting exercise, but unfortunately, AdWords is not as simple as just listing a whole heap of keywords and setting a per-click budget. This is because Google does not simply see who has the highest bid for a given keyword and display their ads first. If this was the case, one cashed-up company could theoretically dominate every keyword search in Google.
Google consider what they call their Quality Score, which takes into account a whole range of factors to determine how relevant your ad is to a given search query. This often means that a small-targeted business can out-perform a large broad corporation despite the larger company outbidding the smaller one quite considerably.
Like most of their algorithms, Google do release part of what goes into into their Quality Score calculation, but how it all comes together is kept secret. An experienced SEM company, such as Reload Consulting, learns from experience how to improve a campaign’s quality score, and this is why investing in an AdWords campaign manager is a wise move.
The quality score is calculated by taking into account a number of factors including landing page load time, landing page relevancy, ad content relevancy; and a combination of how all these factors relate to the keywords. The trick then becomes knowing how to use each of these variables to maximise one’s quality score, and hence, placement in paid search results.
So to achieve the best results from your search strategy, use a combination of both organic SEO and paid SEM. And be prepared to spend a lot of time tinkering if you intend to go it alone.
Popularity: 1%
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