Cuil- The new kid on the search block

The buzz in the search industry right now seems to be revolving around Cuil which is trying to rival Google for the search top spot. Many have tried and failed to do this but with former Google engineers working on this and more pages indexed than any other search engine the people at Cuil seem optimistic.

I have to say it does look pretty cool, the three colum layout and the integration of images give a unique search result layout. But it not enough to look cool its the end product that counts and when doing some searches it does provide different results from Google and the results are pretty good for relavancey.

The main issue however is that the inner pages of a website seem to appear to frequently, i did a few searchs and found the 8 out of the top 20 where the same site! The whole point of searching is to compare other products and services not just a single product.

But it is important to remember that this is a new system and there will be bugs to be ironed out over the coming months. Will it rival Google? It may not be impossible but it will certainly be a tall orderafter all look at Microsoft, with a billion dollar backing and several years in the search industry they only account for 5% of the market. That shows the scale of the task facing Cuil.

Where did all the Google PR go?

I have noticed an interesting trend over the past couple of weeks, a large amount of quality websites seem to have lost a lot of Google PR. I have seen pr9 and pr6 websites lose 2-3 pr levels for no real apparent reason, what is even more confusing is other sites dont really seem to be gaining much PR which begs the question, where the hell did the PR go?

I suppose it really dosent matter too much however since Google PR has been so abused over the years that its influence has decreased greatly. Now i always reckon its better to have high quality links from relevant and trusted sources rather than high pr sites.

But still it is always nice to see that little green bar grow and the fact that my pr has remained at 4 and yet i have trebled traffic mean that it dosent matter too much in the end, still a pr5 would be nice

Business.com

I have just noticed that business.com have put there prices up by a whopping 33% and they also dont seem to charge less for renewals now either. I got a listing with them in March and the fee previosuley was $199 per year and $149 for renewals, it is now $299 per year! That puts it on par with Yahoo Directory for fees and now really makes it a questionable investment.

The choice really comes down to weather you think a single PR5 link for a quality site is worth more than a dozen lower pr links which you get from Yahoo. For a smaller company however it is fair to say that perhaps neither is the answer, as the fees really do seem to be spiraling out of control.

The Importance of a Domain name

I have been experimenting on using .net domains to have a keyword rich domain and have had some good success with it. My first website was www.fortaugustus.net and after doing no link building apart from submitting to ODP and Wikipedia i am acheiving a front page ranking on Google for both the keywords “Fort Augustus” and “Fort Augustus Accommodation”.

My second site was www.hotelsinayr.net and i have just launched it within the last month, again i am achieving front page rankings on Google for keywords such as “hotels in ayr” and “accommodation in ayr”. The aim with this site is to get a No1 ranking for one of the main keywords without spending any money on advertising or link building.

I am not saying that by simply buying a keyword rich domain you will be on the front page but for non competitve keywords it seems to certainly give you a great advantage over your competitors. For more information on this read the following article http://ezinearticles.com/?Has-the-AdWords-Bubble-Burst?&id=1252549