Search Engine Tigers

This advanced operator has apparently been around in Google Experimental for over a year, but since I only came across it recently, it’s new to me, so maybe it is to you.

So what does view:map do? Basically, by adding it to the end of any regular query in Google, you’ll get a results page with a map, and on that map will be markers, and a list of listings that contains some form of geographic identifier. As you can see below posts of mine talk about trips I’ve taken and trips I’m about to take.

Now there are some false positives, I’ve never talked about Texas, but as my name appears on a popular blog near where someone else talks about working for a firm in Texas, it’s picked up, but on the whole it’s pretty good about showing the right results.

So how can this help you? Well, potentially it can enable you to see what locations your product is being talked about in conjunction with (note, not necessarily where the people that are talking about your product are). Sure only 10 listings doesn’t give you much, so go ahead and add &num=100 to the query string to get up to 100 results that mention geo-terms and see what happens. Below is the result for “Specialized Information Publishers Association”

As you can see there’s discussion about their conferences in DC, Chicago, their headquarters in McLean (hey, they’re just around the corner from me), talk about a sponsor in Hawaii, and about a board member from London. How can this help them? Well let’s say that there was a groundswell of SIPA members talking about how there really needs to be a conference in Lancaster, PA. The fact that that location would show up on this map would give them that information, and they could then investigate to see whether there really was any kind of demand for moving one of their conferences out to NYC strip mall shopping central Amish country.

All in all it’s an interesting tool, but there are some false positives that show up in the system that detract slightly from the results, which is probably why it’s still in Google Experimental. Anyway, go give it a play, and if you think of some great use for it, please share.

While doing a little updating on my Local Search slides for Search Camp Philly (pcphilly08) I noticed that between February and tonight Google has modified their disclaimer text at the bottom of each PPC geotargeting page. Take a look, back in February -

…and now -

As you can see they’ve now pushed it front and center that “You may receive clicks from outside our targeted locations”.

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.