Last night a new search engine launched - Cuil, pronounced Cool. Normally this wouldn’t make too much of a splash, but it’s backed by $33 million of VC money, and was founded by former Googlers. They claim to have built a better mousetrap, with more pages in their index than Google. So how does it stack up?

First things first, the home page is cleaner than that of Google’s (no specialized searches listed), and they seem to be going for the anti-Google label, with the background being black, while Google’s is white.  But what about the searches?  Naturally the first one that I did is a vanity search.  Time for it to run - 8 seconds the first time, 3 seconds the next.  Ok, so it’s not as fast as Google, but what about the results?

Rather than 10 results in a column surrounded by paid listings, Cuill has gone for 3 columns containing 11 results (4 each in the first 2 columns, and 3 in the last).  Each listing has a nice chunk of text associated with it, and an image where one can be found (not always that most contextually relevant image, but an image nonetheless).

Result quality?  Hmm, not so good.  For a search engine that claims to index more pages than Google, none of the blogs that I write on, on a regular basis are there (weekly or more frequently).  However, seosfightfat, a blog I was writing for a month earlier this year shows up in 11th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 21st, etc.  Not something that you’d see on Google, with no more than 2 results displaying for the same domain.

I’d seen some people tweet that spam was a big problem on Cuil, so I thought I’d do some further searches to check that out, to see exactly what the extent of that problem was… unfortunately Cuil is no longer working, due to the number of people hitting their service to try it out today, which in itself is not cool.

So, is Cuil the fabled Google killer?  Probably not.  It’s going to take a lot of cash and luck to get any sizable chunk of the search engine business, just ask ASK, and MSN, both of which have tried throwing money at that very same issue, to not succeed.

For more thoughts and opinion, check out the various discussions on the topic linked to by the Search Engine Roundtable article on Cuill.

Last week my 6 year old daughter came home from school all excited…

Daddy, Mr Buchheit (her school principal) kissed a pig today

Really?

Yes, her name was Daisy. Daddy, you have to go to Google…(thinks for a moment)… dot com and search for Daisy the Pig

So upstairs we went to the computer, and yep there at the top of the results for Daisy the Pig was Mr. Buchheit’s new friend Daisy the pot bellied reading Pig.

There are a couple of things that I like about this.

1. This small business man was using his ranking to market himself. No need to tell the kids the URL of his site, instead just tell them to go to Google and type in the pig’s name.
2. My daughter was excited about searching on the web for something that she was interested in, and there was the added bonus that she was going to find the result that she was looking for, because it was known to be there.
3. My daughter now understands a little bit more of what I do for a living.

Further proof that Google is everywhere… If you pick up a copy of the January / February Men’s Health magazine (you know, one of those ones that you see on the shelf at the supermarket right above the candy counter), in between the articles on “5 ways to meet the love of your life” and “5 ways to double your salary in 2 years” is an article on Douglas Merrill, the CIO and VP of Engineering for Google. In this article he shares his 4 rules for organizing your life in order to reduce your stress levels:

1. Empty your Head - Your mind can only hold 7 things at a time, and incomplete tasks take preference, so if you clear your head, you’re going to reduce your stress levels.
2. Swap Filing Cabinets for scaffolds (tools for managing different parts of your life) - not surprisingly he recommends Google tools, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, etc.
3. Redefine organization as search - Don’t attempt to store everything in your head, use a personal online database and search it when you need answers.
4. Leverage other people and their ideas - If you hire bright people from diverse backgrounds with different skill sets, and divide the work up right, you’re going to naturally become more organized.

Naturally the article goes into more detail on each of these than I’m giving you here, but you get the idea. There were a couple of other interesting facts mentioned in the article (not counting the fact that he’s my age, my height, and 25lbs lighter), with the most interesting being that he typically doesn’t travel with a laptop, if he’s going somewhere all he needs is his iPhone. Now it doesn’t say if the other people he travels with bring their laptops with them though.

Google announced yesterday that Google Transit has moved from Google Labs and is not integrated in with Google Maps. This is great news for those of us that want to travel into a city using public transportation (there’s no way I’m driving into DC and fiddling around finding a parking space when I have a decent metro system available). Unfortunately, they don’t have every public transit system in the application yet, but they will be rolling out over time. So if you live in / travel to the Bay Area or Orange County in California, Tampa in Florida, or Hampton Roads in Virginia (among others shown here), you can play with it now. For me and trips to DC, I’ll just have to wait…

A letter from Google regarding changes with Google Base and support for submitting business locations…

Hello, 

At this time, we’re transferring support of Business Locations
bulk uploads from your Google Base account to your Google Local
Business Center account. If you are currently submitting Business
Locations bulk uploads for inclusion in Google Maps via Google
Base, please begin submitting your updated Business Locations bulk
uploads via the Google Local Business Center found here: 

http://www.google.com/local/add/uploadFeed 

If you’ve encountered problems submitting your Business Locations
bulk upload to your Google Base account over the last few weeks,
we recommend that you resubmit your Business Locations bulk upload
using the Google Local Business Center. Google Base will no longer
support the “Business Locations” item type. Instead, please begin
to access and manage your information through your Google Local
Business Center account. You’ll be able to access this account
using the same email login and password you used for Google Base. 

This change will allow you to submit new locations individually
and in the feed format, all from one centralized account. There
will be no need to access your Google Base account for business
locations purposes going forward. 

Please know this was a recent change and we apologize for any
inconvenience this change may cause you. Google Base is a beta
product, which means it is constantly changing and developing. We
are confident this will provide you with a more comprehensive user
experience. 

Sincerely,

The Google Team

A couple of weeks ago I, and every other columnist for Search Engine Land was asked to write a local or mobile article for their special series of ‘Local Search Week‘ and ‘Mobile Search Week‘. I had an idea as to what to write, and did the initial investigation, but just didn’t have the time to write anything up, so instead of it being over there, it’s now over here.I decided to take a look at the various mapping systems out there, and see if they really were all created equally. I did a number of direction requests, and compared the results. For most of the searches the directions were fairly similar, with the ‘Whitehouse to Disneyland’ trip providing the biggest differences, with Yahoo taking a northerly route to start, while MSN & Google headed South. However, at the end of the trip, Yahoo & Google went the same way, while MSN went their own route. (The order in the image below is Yahoo, Google, MSN).

So what about timing? Obviously the title of this post gives you an idea of how those results came out. For virtually every trip that I put into all Yahoo, Google, MSN & Mapquest, Yahoo came back with the fastest time to the destination. The only divergence from that pattern was the Whitehouse to Disneyland trip, where MSN beat Yahoo into second place. N.B. MSN could not find a route from Anchorage, AK to Miami, FL.

So, if you’re going to travel from Anchorage to Miami, Yahoo will save you 4 hours over mapquest (while traveling only 67 fewer miles), even traveling from Scotland to the South of England will save you 2 hours over Google maps, despite traveling 2 more miles…

While doing a search to determine differences in SERPs due to personalization, I noticed that when I was logged in and receiving personalized results there were PPC ads displayed. When I logged out and performed the same search, no PPC ads.  At least there was the same number of organic results…

Today I did a search on Google for Neil Gaiman, and saw the interesting result of the combined listing up top, showing links to the main site, the journal, work, cool stuff and things, and Fragile Things. The second result was for the journal… the exact same url as shown in the combined listing up top.

Checking this out against other searches, I see that this is fairly common. Is it fair though? Should Google be giving double listings for the same URLs? In this case, should they remove the journal link from the first listing, or remove the second listing completely? From a user perspective, they should probably place everything together in the first listing, but from a company perspective, that wants to dominate their SERPs, they’d want the second listing to remain. What do you think? Is it fair / user friendly as it stands?

Google Universal Search has killed SEO, well ok, it hasn’t, but it has changed it. Universal Search places different types of results in with the regular search results. So a search for “Lindsay Lohan” gives you the following results. Note the pictures, and the news results talking about how her friends fear for her life. Very up to date, considering she was arrested for DUI last night.

Of course, everyone must see those very same results when they search on Google right? Well, not if you have a co-branded search site, such as those set as the default on new Dell desktops. In fact, here’s the very same search done at the very same time. Note, no pictures, no news (outside of the paid ad), and a large difference in the total number of search results returned.

I have no idea as to the usage of Dell co-branded Google searches as opposed to actual Google searches, but this just goes to prove that you shouldn’t assume that everyone is on the same page when it comes to new functionality, as they’re quite clearly not!

(note: Firefox co-branded Google searches return the exact same results as regular Google).

Thanks to DazzlinDonna I now have a GrandCentral account. What this means is that I have my own phone number that, when used, dials out to my home phone, my work phone, and my mobile phone at the same time. Whichever one answers first gets the call. So if I happen to be out for lunch, I’ll get the call on my cell, if I’m at home I’ll get the call there, etc. It’ll be interesting to try it out and see how well it works for me (maybe I don’t want to be too accessible for some people)

If you’re interested in trying it out, I have 9 invites remaining, just drop me a comment below and I’ll send them out until they’re gone.