New search engine Cuil plans to break Google monopoly

The hunt for information on the internet has been synonymous with Google. The search engine has maintained a clear lead over Yahoo and Microsoft, the number two and three players, respectively, in web search. While earlier attempts by Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc to join forces against Google failed, a team of former Google engineers and others who worked at eBay, IBM and AltaVista have come up with an alternative called Cuil (pronounced cool).

Cuil plans to not only break the monopoly of Google, but also change the surfing culture among users. ET decided to experience the new web search engine cuil.com.

Cuil, which precisely means knowledge in Irish, is a start-up by led by husband-wife team Tom Costello (CEO of Cuil) and Anna Patterson, president, along with former colleagues Russell Power, vice-president of engineering, and Louis Monier, vice-president of products. Cuil has got venture funding of about $30 million from Tugboat Ventures, Greylock Partners and Madrone Capital Partners.

At Cuil, search index spans over 120 billion web pages, which is much larger than any existing search engine including Google (almost thrice its index span). The results are based on content and relevance. Popularity and audience traffic take a backseat.

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Google continues to dominate European search spend

Google continues to dominate the European market, with over 85% of the search marketing budgets going to Google in the UK, and over 95% in the rest of Europe, according to the ‘UK Search Engine Performance Report: Q2 2008’ from Efficient Frontier.

As well as holding its position in the UK in pure search, Google has further strengthened its position through a number of improvements to its content network, which has led to a modest increase in market share from 3.9% to 4.3%.

Also making modest gains in market share, Microsoft now captures 4% of search budgets in the UK. Both Google’s and Microsoft Live Search gains come at the expense of Yahoo.

The ROI available to advertisers on Microsoft Live Search is still higher than the other two engines.

This is due to the high quality of users of Microsoft Live Search and a less competitive marketplace. Correspondingly, Google and Yahoo both offer similar ROI, but Google outperforms Yahoo! due to the high traffic volume - 8.5 times the volume on Yahoo.

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Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine

In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results. Skip to next paragraph

The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.

Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.

On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.

“I think it will be better,” Mr. Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of start-up companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. (In June, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the United States, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, according to comScore.) Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none have managed to make a dent in the search market.

But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

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The (very) basic building blocks of a strong online presence

It’s Christmas in July, and what better way to celebrate the somewhat bizarre festive season than with these little gems, which will ensure that your website stands out from the crowd in the congested search engine wilderness. Without too much of an introduction then, let’s jump right in.

Keyword research
Probably the most important aspect of building a strong web presence is ensuring that your website is targeting the correct key phrases. Here, there are three things to consider. Firstly, that the key phrase is a popular and searched for term ie: it wouldn’t be sensible to focus your accommodation website around the term “luxury Wynberg villa” if there is no demand for it.

Secondly, that the key phrases are related to what your website is offering ie: “cape town accommodation” may be a highly searched for term, but it wouldn’t be applicable to your Garden Route tour operator website.

And lastly, to weigh it up against the competition ie: “Cape Town guest house” may be a great term, but there are eight million competing pages on Google.

There are some great keyword research tools out there, including Keyword Discovery, WordTracker as well as the Google Adword Tool. These programmes will give you an indication of historical search trends, as well as helping you come up with alternative phrases you may not have thought of, so go through these carefully and come up with as comprehensive a list as you can. The best way to do this is probably to whip out the old Excel spreadsheet and list all the phrases in consideration, with columns for the various programmes you are making use of. Once you have a long list of terms, go through your selection and carefully select your main keywords, secondary keywords etc.

Implementing these keywords
Once you have these keywords, it then comes down to implementing them within your site. Remember, each one of your website pages is a potential entry point for a user. In a perfect world, someone searching for “red widgets” on Google would arrive at the “red widget” page on your website, rather than the “blue widget” page, so these all need to be optimised accordingly.

Generally, pages should be optimised for one to two main key phrases; anything more than that and you should probably look at creating an additional page focusing on those extra terms. In terms of implementing the keywords, the title tag is probably the most important area to look at. As an example, let’s say you had a page focused on the phrases “online florist” and “cape town flower seller”, you could then have a title tag of “Online Florist Cape Town Flower Seller”. The meta description and meta keyword tags have little to no effect on proceedings. The meta description tag will be what is displayed below your link on Google however, so just ensure that it’s concise, clear and easy to understand.

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Giving Your Site a Social Life

When shopping for a one-stop-shop solution in building a social platform, small businesses should consider various elements, including original content, aggregate content and user interaction, notes Yann Motte, cofounder and CEO of Webjam.

The world of online business communication has introduced two industry-changing elements for small business: more customers and more competitors. Circa 1999, you were ahead of the competition by simply having a Web site to preview your service or products. By 2004, Web transactions were the norm, and convenience was the king.

Now both those previous core competencies have become expected norms, with social interaction, immediate consumer feedback, and a live and evolving social network and Web presence the new differentiators for cutting-edge online small business best practices.

Advantages of an active social presence include increased user interaction, higher market penetration, optimized advertising revenue, and multiplied audience visibility, to name a few opportunities. Unfortunately, for most small businesses, the options for developing online visibility are diverse and intimidating: How do we design a Web site? Do we need a blog? What is RSS (really simple syndication)? How do we keep users informed with RSS? What if we want to add widgets? How do we protect the privacy of our users?

Facebook and MySpace are the first two names that jump out, given their mass-market appeal and reputation, but they are poorly designed for business needs. There are alternative, less known companies who are developing social publishing platforms and are more specifically addressing the needs of organization and businesses looking for simple, low-maintenance and integrated solutions.

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The host with the most

Over tea and toast on my last visit to London, Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph, said he had pondered the question posed by the title of the book I'm writing - What Would Google Do? - and answered with a striking vision for newspapers: what if they handed over much of their work to Google? Roussel reasoned that Google already is the best distributor online; it's hard to imagine a newspaper creating better technology than Google. And the service is proving to be brilliant at ad sales - so why not outsource those departments to Google so a paper can concentrate on its real job - journalism?

Roussel was actually asking and answering what business a newspaper is really in. The next day at the Guardian, in one of its Future of Journalism seminars, I suggested that it, too, must make that critical decision. AOL thought it was in the content business, but it was actually in the community business before anyone else - AOL should have been Facebook. Yahoo, too, thought it was about content -instead, it was in the ad business long before Google. Yahoo should have been Google.

Newspapers are in the wrong businesses. They should no longer be in manufacturing and distribution, which have become cost-heavy yokes. And they should no longer try to be in the technology business - because they're bad at it. When I said this on my blog, Bob Wyman, a technology entrepreneur now at Google, commented that technology infrastructure "is a cost of doing business. It is not a thing of value." So I asked him whether Google should fulfil Roussel's vision as a paper's new pressroom.

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Google learns to crawl Flash?

According to Google, they have been developing “a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.”

They explain further: “We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilising Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.”

However, no matter what they say, I’ve yet to see Flash sites or SWF content of any kind being indexed in my many searches I do through Google on a daily basis. So, for now, I’m not getting excited about this announcement until I see it working for myself, de facto. I would be interested if anyone reading this has had SWF content indexed in any of their Google searches …

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20+ Must-Have FireFox Search Plugins for SEOs

The ability to access almost any search engine right from your browser is awesome:

• you have all engines in one place;
• you can switch from engine to engine with one mouse click;
• you save time and space: easy-to-use drop down menu to choose the engine you need;
• you can enjoy quick and easy installation (besides, most of these search plugins work for both FireFox and Internet Explorer);
• you get plenty of search options without making your browser work slower (unlike with many of extensions).

FireFox search plugins for SEOs:

1. Google and Yahoo (if you don’t have their dedicated toolbars installed);

2. Urban dictionary - to search for your keyword slang and urban synonyms and definitions.

3. The Free Dictionary - to research your keyword related terms, definitions and synonyms.

4. Whois Look-up - to quickly find a domain registrant’s details.

5. Summize - to get instant access to Twitter live conversation search.

6. Facebook search - to find people and build connections.

7. Google unpersonalized search - to turn off personalized search in Google.

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Adsense CLICK Fraud-How do you prevent being involved in this fraud?

Many web site owners are getting their Google Adsense account terminated when they have done nothing wrong to deserve the punishment. Considering the money that they are getting from Adsense, they would certainly want to get back into it, and no wonder as the money that can be made over time is huge

It is that same consideration why the Google Adsense click fraud is thought of and why many people are getting into it.

Click fraud is the act of clicking on ads for the purpose of costing the advertiser money. It is simply the same as paying out cash for false leads. Many people website owners are aware of this fraud and are sharing the same sentiment that this is the one big problem that Adsense is facing.

How do you prevent being involved in this fraud?

Majority of web hosts are offering access logs. Once this is offered to you, it is necessary that you hand it over to Google as well. This allows them to look for any suspicious activity on your site. Problems like this are very serious and giving it to them is saying that you would want to help them in any way you can in solving the problem.

It can also help if you have a click monitoring software. If you do not have one yet, you should try and get one. There is absolutely no major factor preventing you from having one because most of this software is free.

As usual, all the information you have received should be turned over to Google. This is showing Google that you too are fighting against click frauds and that you are not a part of it.

Study your server logs and watch for any activity that seems suspicious. Report anything that you may find odd, may it big or small thing.

You may want to consider disabling ads for your own IP address and local geographic area. This will certainly prevent accidents and will not make Google mistake another user as you. You can do through a hackers file. This will avoid Google mistaking as clicking on your own ads and be kicked out because of it.

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Google is 'human' after all

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) may be a company based on reality after all. In addition to the company's search market share and increasing brand awareness worldwide, its lavish employee perks and working conditions have earned it an enviable position among IT and software workers. Free bus rides to work, free food and drink and other nice perks are part of working for the internet giant. Just don't ask about its daycare facilities.

Google announced last week that it would be raising the prices of its infant care services by almost 75%. This after bringing in employees to tell them of the change in advance and gauge their collective feedback. Although many parents were left in awe (as in, how could Google do this!), the company decided to implement the plan gradually over five quarters and reduce the price increase. The annual daycare costs for two kids would have risen from $33,000 per year to $57,000 per year (it's not clear how much the increase was reduced). Is Google doing evil here? Nope -- just joining reality.

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Yahoo! re-enters merger talks with Time Warner

Yahoo! spent the July 4 bank holiday weekend in discussions with its lead adviser, Goldman Sachs, and potential bid partners including Time Warner to defend itself from a break-up by Microsoft.

The online search engine is seeking to re-heat talks with the cable company about a possible merger with AOL, its internet arm, in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion (£5 billion).

Yahoo! is trying to secure some kind of deal before its shareholders meet to vote on whether to re-elect their board on August 1.

The company has sought to re-open talks after it emerged last week that Microsoft is also in talks with companies such as Time Warner to try to launch a break up bid of Yahoo!.

The software giant wants to control Yahoo!'s internet search engine so that it can compete more aggressively with Google and seize a bigger slice of the online advertising market estimated to be worth about $40 billion and set to double by 2010.

Insiders at Yahoo! insist that an offer which sought to break up the company would not work because of the difficulty in valuing its non-search business.

Jerry Yang, co-founder and chief executive of Yahoo! is threatened on two fronts in the short term.

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Google tries its hand in traditional ads

Ten years ago this September, two Stanford University doctoral students launched a business that would revolutionize how millions of people use the Internet.

Yes, Google is getting older, at least in tech years.

But don’t expect the world’s dominant search engine company to remain content with the enormous success it has achieved so far.

Google is rolling out innovative features that will allow users to search the Web more efficiently. It is also looking to expand its advertising reach, focusing on the folks who do their queries via mobile phones and car-based systems. Google has been increasing its spending on research and development, which totaled $2.1 billion last year alone.

The company has come a long way since Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google in a garage in Menlo Park, Calif. One of the most feared and respected technology giants in the world, Google earned $4.2 billion in profits last year and employs nearly 17,000 workers.

With more than half of its user traffic coming from outside the United States, Google has evolved into a global company. It operates 60 offices in 20 countries.

It’s no surprise that the company is extremely secretive about its product plans. To get some hints about what may be in store for users of Google’s search engine and its AdWords advertising program, the Detroit Free Press recently talked to two top Google executives.

“We’re constantly looking at the user experience - what they want, what they need,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience.

Google regularly makes improvements to its search engine, which now contains billions of Web pages compared with only 30 million in 1998.

However, it took a major leap last year by introducing what it calls “universal search.” This is a more comprehensive search engine that includes video, images, maps, news and other data. Previously, you had to visit several Google search products to get different types of information.

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When E-Mail Bites Back

Bill Gates Isn't The Only One Whose Old Messages Have Proved Perilous

THIS ANTITRUST THING,'' Microsoft chairman Bill Gates allegedly told executives from Intel at a meeting in 1995, ""will blow over.'' Microsoft wasn't changing its business practices at all as a result of the government investigation, Gates continued, according to handwritten notes by an Intel executive--except that it might revise its policy on keeping records of corporate e-mail. That may have been meant as a joke. As of last week the company has never had an e-mail policy, according to a Microsoft spokesman. Thus in its protracted investigation the government was able to get its hands on an estimated 3.3 million Microsoft documents, including mega-bytes of e-mail messages dating from the early 1990s--and is now using them to contradict Gates's own videotaped testimony in the most significant antitrust case of the decade.

From the glass towers of midtown Manhattan to the glass shoe boxes of Silicon Valley rose a muffled murmur of clicks last week, the sound of cubicle dwellers hitting DELETE as they scrolled through years of accumulated electronic correspondence, in search of business plans that smacked of brilliance, as well as illegality; projections of how much the company could save by laying off everyone over 55; dirty jokes; mash notes, and comments about the CEO's bald spot. Those who didn't think of this on their own were encouraged to do so by cybersavvy employers, like Amazon.com, the online book merchant, which this fall instructed workers that all nonessential documents ""should be destroyed when they are no longer current or useful,'' according to a company spokesman. Until now, says Los Angeles attorney Michael Overly, an expert on electronic communications, only around a third of all businesses have had formal policies on the content, handling and archiving of e-mail, and only about a third of those have been actively enforced. But he predicts these numbers will climb sharply, propelled not just by the Microsoft trial but also by Chevron's $2.2 million settlement in 1995 with a group of female employees who took offense at e-mail postings such as the one headed ""25 reasons why beer is better than women.'' For many companies, he says, ""the honeymoon with e-mail is coming to an end.''

Surprisingly, indiscreet e-mail can be even more dangerous than written records and memos. An unfiled note gets deleted in the next day's trash, but in a typical office network almost all e-mail is recorded on the system server (graphic). Messages sent years ago may live on in taped storage, far beyond the reach of a delete key, although not of a subpoena. Lack of space is rarely a problem; Randy Kolb, information services director for the city of Eugene, Ore., estimates that one employee has 180 megabytes of e-mail stored up, equivalent to roughly 180,000 typed sheets of paper. But it would be the work of minutes for a computer to sort it all for lawyers in search of a single incriminating phrase.

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