Will Cuil Change The Direction Of Search Engine Optimization?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, July 31, 2008

Google is the dominant search engine and has been for many years. There has been a lot of hype surrounding the recent release of Cuil. The founders certainly have the credentials to develop a top search engine. There are two former employees of Google along with Tom Costello from IBM and Louis Monier, a founder of Altavista. Will they challenge Google and if so, will we need to rethink our search engine optimization strategies?

Cuil is different in four areas; web index, algorithm, results display and privacy. Privacy is possibly the one big selling point for Cuil given Google’s appetite for knowing what everyone is doing, where they are spending their money and how long they stay on various sites.

The results display is different. Three columns by three rows, a total of nine results per page. Each result has more information than most of the major search engines. Cuil boast that they have more pages indexed than any other search engine, a big claim given their brief existence.

Where SEO may be affected long term is the algorithms used to rank pages and return search results. Cuil is trying to rank pages based on content rather than popularity. It has been tried before with little success. Perhaps Cuil will be different. However, with the brief tests I ran today the results returned where less than favorable. Even searches based on website names tended to deliver sites that link in rather than the website itself.

If Cuil does take off then we may need to rethink some aspects of our search engine optimization strategies. At present, I am not rushing in to any changes. There are too many issues that will need to be addressed if Cuil is going to make any sort of impact on the search wars.

Category: Search Engines

Read similar posts in Search Engines

2 Comments

Comment by Spyros

Made Sunday, 3 of August , 2008 at 4:53 am

Hi Nick!

I tried it and was not impressed with the SERPS or with the fake images next to the results. I also believe that on the web there is no such thing as BETA if it is open to all. You could call it BETA if it was be invite only. Another thing I didn’t like was the SERPS layout. It doesn’t work for me. I think that SERPS should be posted one under the other. It is easier to scan and provides a logical sequence of importance to the results. The worst thing that I found was the fact that even though it claims to have indexed more pages than any other SE it still returned no results for many searched I performed, mostly question style searches.

Thanks

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Sunday, 3 of August , 2008 at 11:22 am

Hi Spyros,

I think Cuil is still very new and is trying to compete with the big boys. This will take allot of money and effort and only time will tell if it can be done…thanks for reading!