Could Cuil be a useful tool to check on-site SEO effectiveness?
Earlier today the new search engine Cuil was officially launched. While it’s obviously got a long way to get anywhere near competing with Google what I find interesting is that it’s been developed by former Google engineers and that it “ranks pages by content, rather than popularity”.
This means that rather than ranking a page based upon the quality of it’s backlinks, Cuil will list the webpage’s which it’s algorithm feel are well-optimised towards a specific query. This probably isn’t great news for Cuil itself (as many well-optimised but untrusted websites will rank highly in it’s search results) but I would imagine a lot of the same on-site optimisation factors which are relevant in Google have also been applied to Cuil.
This could make Cuil a very useful indicator of how effective your on-site SEO will be in Google. For example, a search for SEO will display websites containing relevant content as opposed to the trusted authority domains ranking in Google:
Providing domain for sale websites in the SERP’s such as seo.co.nz doesn’t really provide users with the results they are looking for, but it does show that using the targeted keywords within title tags, h1 headings and paragraph tags works as an effective method of on-site SEO.
So while there are already many opinions from about Cuil (both positive and negative), perhaps it should be taken seriously by SEO’s to help reassure yourself that a site’s content is well-optimised and heading in the right direction!
July 28th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I’m no SEO expert, but I was playing around on Cuil and was unimpressed so far. What I have read looks promising, but they still need to implement a bunch of things to be a viable contender. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks the engine matures some more and its value becomes more apparent.
July 28th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Reposting my comments from another blog (one last time):
The problem with your average SEO is that they assume they already know everything, including how it should work and how it does work; they get very haughty when things don’t meet those expectations. To say the least, they’d make poor quantum physicists.
Just about everyone is making the assumption that Cuil throws us back 10 years and ignores popularity. That’s due to a poorly worded press release. Read a bit deeper and you find this:
“Popularity is useful, but not always important.
Popularity is useful, but has dominated search results so heavily that it gets harder and harder to find the page you want, especially if your search is a complex one. Cuil respects popular pages and recognizes that for many simple searches, popularity is an easy answer to your question. But for a deeper search, establishing relevancy is more than a numbers game.”
So let’s take a moment and analyze.
For a simple search (one word), popularity metrics are employed. The site has been out for 24 hours, of course your page 1 Google result is different from your page 1 Cuil result.
3+ word searches have been borked all morning. Okay, let’s look at that… for COMPLEX searches, Cuil is using their algo. The algo is down, probably being tweaked. It makes a poor first impression but this is a really useful time for SEOs to be PAYING ATTENTION.
Why?
Because you can see where popularity ends and the algo begins.
July 28th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
The bottom line is that Google needs a rival, and a rival that doesn’t determine positioning by monitoring a site’s obsessive and irrelevant linking tactics. On-site SEO can speak volumes for a quality site if it’s measured correctly.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Cuil is going no where when i searched for the word PLAYSTATION 3 on Cuil i got 3,200,000 look at my other results.
1. Yahoo 440,000,000
2. MSN 152,000,000
3. Google 109,000,000
4. AOL 17,400,000
5. Ask 16,120,000
6. Cuil 3,200,000
July 29th, 2008 at 4:04 am
What i like about this “Cuil” so far is that it has no ads. Google started same way too, to survive it resorted to ads. Hopefully this Search engine could find a method to survive without ads (while still being free). Which I do not click on anyway be it text, or graphical. I developed “ad” blindness. So I do not see the ads on any page. I do not want to “steal” but over my 8 years on the web. I clicked few times on an ad. It simply does not interest me as much as the contents i’m reading.
July 29th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Unimpressed so far. Did a search on our company name and while i didnt expect it necessarily to come top it should have been in top ten. It isnt and other low level sites that just mention us come up above us. Their pages maybe optimsed but they are certainly not “well-optimised towards a specific query”. (a page cannot be found on a site be built actually performed better than our homepage!)
I will not be paying it much attention until it irons out these understandable but critical issues.
July 31st, 2008 at 1:14 am
This is just starting of cuil and he has collect so more database, so, we can imagine that in future, what cuil can do!!!!!!
Cuil is going to be a top search engine and now google has to do something to save and maintain his reputation.
August 4th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Based on what Ive seen so far Im very un-impressed!! Lots of 404 pages / irelevant results…
August 11th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Hi, just so you know. seo.co.nz is not really a domain for sale website. It was a full website (see More results from http://www.seo.co.nz) until recently when the home page was changed to reflect it’s current for sale status. I think cuil probably crawled it before it was changed and of course it still has all the internal backlinks. It has been round for years as a functioning site (although was auxiliary to our main business).
My take on Cuil’s results is that they are better than any SE launch I have seen (and I remember when they launched one called Google) but of course have a way to go. My main beef is the association of unconnected images with the text snippet from the site.