7.31.2008

Cuil.com not so cool for SEO/SEM/Internet Marketing

Cuil.com is a new search engine that is a spinoff from some of the boys who left google. Want to learn the backstory, get learned up here.

I think its a neat idea people are trying to challenge the almighty Google, however the name of the game is not to launch websites (especially major sites) in beta mode.

Cuil is an interesting concept, giving each site more of an advertisement with its image and brief description from the first 200 characters or so on the site. In fact I was pretty excited when I typed in "pest control san diego" and saw that Happy was already listing 1st page for it. That excitement dropped when I saw the site cache was from what looks like 2 months ago. I decided to look up "full monty marketing inc" next. Not only did I not come up with the logical, most relevant site, but instead I was provided:
Salisbury, Ct Jobs - Simply Hired
Iron Man - Go Sale
Not really relevant considering that though we like neato toys in the office, we don't own an Iron Man suit. If we did though we could fly out to Salisbury, Connecticut to apply for a job for our own company.

I started looking around and playing with Cuil some more, I found that relevance isn't nearly as important to Cuil as just being generally on the right website theme is. To be more specific, your index page's first couple hundred characters. So if you want to rank well for Cuil (at least currently) keyword spam the hell out of the first words on the page.

Im actually advocating spam...


For its faults, I think they're on to something at Cuil. If Im arsing about on an Iphone, I don't want to deal with the small fonts of google, I want pictures and head tags. It gives me the "good enough" information Im seeking at that moment, and if I want to expand on it, Ill do it at home on a laptop later on.

Now if only they could work on the relevance issue so that sites dont start looking like:
"Football Picks, Football, Footballs, Football and Football Players, Football Games and who won the Football Superbowl..." You get where Im going.