According to an article in eWeek a bit ago, some former Google engineers have rolled out a new search engine…one that will index more of the web than Google…faster and cheaper.  This is the first time another search engine has truly thrown down the gauntlet and made it known that they are taking on the giant.  While Yahoo and MSN fight for second place, www.cuil.com has proudly made it known that they are going straight for first.

Cuil co-founder, Tom Costello stated, “Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user.”  From information taken from the CUIL web site, the search engine will use ‘content and relevance’ rather than the ‘popularity index’ that Google uses (inlinking and traffic patterns).

Personally, I love the look of the site.

the new cool search engine

But, I do have a bit of a problem with the results, probably because the terms I rank well for in Google, are no where to be found in CUIL.COM.  In fact, when checking for our company name in CUIL.COM, we were number 3 in the rankings, something that is a bit hard to understand, considering the number 1 result SHOULD be the company site:

Shouldn't CimmeronStudios.com be number ONE?!

I checked this on a few other sites and found similar results.  By no means is this a large enough sampling to be conclusive, but it does point to something I find interesting.  Across all sites I checked, the site itself did not rank number one for it’s own URL.  Now, this could be seen as a problem because how often does a site mention it’s own name and/or URL?  Is it the content itself, or the lack of it, what is causing the site to not rank well for it’s own URL?

In fact, when I did a CUIL search for Talkism.com, there were 27 results, with the actual site itself ranking last.  Some of the results in the list didn’t even contain the domain Talkism.com, so it’s really unclear how valuable this search would be.

Valuable results?

When I tried this same experiment with Google, the first result was Google Maps and second was Google.com.  Searching in CUIL for Google.com did bring the actual search engine as the first result but why? There isn’t any real content to speak of on the Google.com page….

The point I’m trying to make is this - for sites that are honestly trying to get their name out there, such as Cimmeron Studios, our website design company, if a potential client were to search CUIL for Cimmeron Studios and NOT link to our web site, how is this providing them with the best results?  Perhaps a bit more digging into the science and philosophy behind CUIL.com is needed before this engine will be able to gain some market share in the search engine wars.

Ok, what does this mean to designers in SEO-land? Nothing at this point, but it should be kept an eye on simply because any kind of merger between the ‘lesser two’ search engines will signify some major changes and would possibly make google ‘tighten the ship’ a bit, but it’s really difficult to say.

and maybe I’m missing the point but really - would 2 lesser engines = 1 big engine?  I don’t think so. In fact, I would question if this would do anything more than eliminate one member of the competition for the top search engine position.  Think about it: microsoft has in the past, tried to squeeze out the competition…is this what they’re doing with yahoo or are they going to take yahoo’s relatively different approach and combine it with theirs?  That’s, to me, like microsoft taking macs approach and trying to combine it with their pc-based one - it won’t work well, that’s for sure.

however, it’s important to point out that a deal isn’t on the table, or at least that’s what they’re saying.  Read about microsoft’s bid to buy yahoo on yahoo news.

Interesting article from Forbes, unfortunately, it’s not entirely accurate. Matt Cutts explains everything very clearly in his blog in response to the article.  It’s a good read and designers should know what’s going on with the latest buzz words (Google Hell, Supplemental Results) as well as the real perspective from Google.

Read Google Hell Blog here.