Comments on: Could Cuil be a useful tool to check on-site SEO effectiveness?

By: Mark lapsley

Mark lapsley — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:06:47 +0000

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:30:08 +0000

Based on what Ive seen so far Im very un-impressed!! Lots of 404 pages / irelevant results…

By: D S

D S — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:14:29 +0000

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.

By: Toby Mason

Toby Mason — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:55:11 +0000

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.

By: Mittens

Mittens — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:04:06 +0000

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.

By: Ivan_PSP

Ivan_PSP — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:32:14 +0000

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

By: Suz

Suz — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:59:39 +0000

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.

By: Ian Armstrong

Ian Armstrong — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:50:49 +0000

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.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:08:39 +0000

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.