Am I Famous Now…

Well, the latest entrant in the search engine space now claims to have catalogued 121,617,892,992 web pages.

This number adds up to three times as many as Google, say Cuil’s founders, some of whom are ex-Google staff out on their own adventure.

But does more equal better? Cuil is so cool that it is difficult to understand how to search from its minimalist home page. Ok, stick in a word, and you get a mosaic-style presentation of about ten summaries per page, usually with an image.

Cuil says its engine searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance (that is the secret sauce in every search engine). Once the engine finds a page with the keywords you entered, it analyse the rest of its “content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency”.

The engine then pops out with the mosaic presentation.

Usually, Cuil also presents a pull down panel to further burrow down into the results by category. On bigger searchers, Cuil also presents tabs suggesting ways to clarify the search. A search for “News” will produce tabs such as “World news”, “Local News” produce tabs such as “World news”, “Local News” and the “Newport News”.

Even typing in a search query might produce a menu of suggestions before you click on the “search” button.

I guess the presentation is the main difference one notices from the others, which usually list results. Cuil explains the presentation as easier to read, as the text is in columns, like a newspaper. When you first visit, the default ’safe search’ feature is on. Turn it on or off as to your preference. You can also choose to have a pop up menu of suggestions while you type.

One advantage of Cuil is it does not collect reader search statistics, since the search engine does not use keyword popularity to rank what results are presented to the user. “We analyze the Web, not our users,” the site proclaims.

In response Google has already weighed in against Cuil’s claim that the company has created the “world’s biggest index”. Google says: “We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big.”

Whew, what a broadside. Google adds that its search engine recently hit a milestone by finding one trillion unique URLs on the web at once to process. That is one trillion without duplicate content.

The Google engine works by starting at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. The engine then follows those links on those new pages to compile a huge list of links.

Google does not index every one of the pages it finds, just the ones that seem most data relevant, what ever that means. Google is therefore sticking by the principles that helped make it king: quality of results trumps size.

Cuil claims to have both size and relevance. That claim can only be stress tested by users over the coming months. Right now, Cuil seems to have some problems in producing results sometime, but that is only my initial tests. May the best search engine win!

While we are on Google scroll down in the Google blog (http://googleblog.blogspot.com) to 16 July, where you will find an even more detailed explanation of how the search engine works. This is perhaps of interest to marketers seeking to get their clients’ pages higher up in the Google results, a job role that seems to have been created with the advent of the search engine.

In fact earlier this month Google introduced an update to its package of tools for webmasters meant to help them create and fix content pages to ensure they got a good ranking with Google. The tools provide data such as when sites were last crawled, what other sites are linking to them, and the search terms that are driving traffic to their sites.

The tools are now available for free through qualified domain hosters to allow their customers access to the data.