Now it’s not very often that I’m wrong (*office stifles a unison snigger), and less so that I simply don’t understand things (*all-out raucous laughter ensues behind me), but there are some things that fathom me more than others. The latest, being Cuil.
Ok, so it’s a search engine (with a stupid ‘cool’ pronunciation) that lets you see the web pages in a grid pattern with preview text and image. Well, didn’t Ask search engine do that a while back? And yeah, it claims to be the only search engine that produces results through indexing references such as page rank and links, but, doesn’t Google page rank do that anyway? And notably with only 120 billion pages indexed which is, so say Giga Om, a lot smaller than Google. Though, the San Francisco Chronicle cites that in actual fact Google only index 30-50 billion pages and that this is based on their own page ranking system, which could be skewed, as many of us know from loopholes in the algorithm that allows a page to rank higher.
So, what’s all the fuss about? Why do we want to index our pages more relevantly? Well for one, we can then see those that are more frequently visited based on the context and concepts within the text, rather than the sites linking in to the site as per Google’s API. Well, is this going to do us any good? As SEO specialists, this means that meta-tagging and article relevance have more sway over, say, affiliate link building and blog/forum link building. However, without people supporting their comments/articles/content with these long-lost concepts such as ‘fact’ and ‘evidence’ it could lead to a cacophony of mad people contextualising complete insanity and ranking top of the search results as a result. And, ironically given that the premise is to avoid spam, could create even more of it!
Mind you, I’ll give Cuil this: they managed to identify another 25 billion websites in its opening weekend due to their 10-years-in-development-web crawler system, which will give the WOM monitoring software developers such as Radian6 a run for their money.
That is, of course before their servers overheated and it was discovered that a major flaw in the system is that it doesn’t index by age of site, which means that a lot of old data is thrown up.
Google has built a much wider overall site recognition system based on user analytics, input, branding and it’s plethora of applications, that seem to be building a one-stop stop in an age where we are starting to see the emergence of micro-networks and usage such as Ning.
Google still wins out in my mind – and ex-Google staff or not, I think they’ll have to work very hard to get the kind of usability that Google has. Which, after all, is the key.
