Cuil - The World's Biggest Search Engine

Cuil.com is rocking now.

Cuil (pronounced [kuːl], "cool") is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. It went live on July 28, 2008.^[1][2]

Unlike other search engines,^[3] Cuil's privacy policy states that it does not store records of users’ search activity or IP addresses.^[4]

Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier.^[5] Another founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others.^[6] The company raised $33 million in venture capital from Greylock and others.^[7]

Here are some of the references

1. ^ ^{a b} Liedtke, Michael, Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search, Associated Press, 28 July 2008, retrieved 28 July 2008
2. ^ http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080728/google_challenger.html
3. ^ Liedtke, Michael (December 11, 2007). "Ask.com will purge search info in hours", Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne Newspapers. Retrieved on 2007-12-11.
4. ^ http://www.cuil.com/info/privacy/
5. ^ "Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine - NYTimes.com". nytimes.com. Retrieved on 2008-07-28.
6. ^ news.bbc.co.uk, Search site aims to rival Google
7. ^ Crunchbase: Cuil Profile
8. ^ http://www.cuil.com/info/faqs/#faq4
9. ^ Needleman, Rafe (July 28, 2008). "Cuil shows us how not to launch a search engine", CNET news, CNET. Retrieved on 2008-07-28.
10. ^ Hamilton, Anita (July 28, 2008). "Why Cuil is No Threat to Google", Time.com, Time Magazine Online. Retrieved on 2008-07-28.
11. ^ Burdick, Dave (July 28, 2008). "Cuil Review: Really? No Dave Burdicks? This Search Engine Is Stupid", huffingtonpost.com, Huffington Post. Retrieved on 2008-07-28.
12. ^ Metz, Cade (July 29, 2008). "Ex-Googlers reinvent web search", www.theregister.co.uk, The Register. Retrieved on 2008-07-29.
13. ^ Sullivan, Danny (July 28, 2008). "Cuil Launches -- Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?", search engine land blog, Search Engine Land. Retrieved on 2008-07-28

Source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil

Ranking Factors of Major players - Part 3

MSN search.

MSN was showing results from inktomi and looksmart but when yahoo captured them it’s obvious for Microsoft to develop there own search

Descriptive page titles and page content are playing a vital role on the search result of msn. Internal pages are liked to grow well as compare to the main page.
Crawling of pages by msn is little poor if compared to Google and yahoo. They are no where comprehensive as compare to yahoo and Google when crawling big sites like ebay and amazon
MSN still left behind them self to distinguish quality back links from low quality backlinks. Some more back links can bias the results no matter what may be the quality. They stand a quite better in query processing as compare to yahoo as they process queries by meaning instead of literally that yahoo does. But still they are far away from Google.
As microsofts limited crawling history MSN is not as good as the other major search engines to differentiate between real organic citations and low quality links. The effect of ranking is quicker than other. Sites with relatively few quality links that gain
Site authority is being considered by all major search engines except MSN when evaluating pages. Also they are not as good as the other engines at determining age related trust scores. New sites doing general textbook SEO and acquiring a few descriptive inbound links (perhaps even low quality links) can rank well in MSN within a month.
Microsoft Content Ads is the most advanced paid search ad platform on the web.msn seems to be lacking editorial with its internal relevancy measurement team. They don’t even think from a social aspect.
MSN SEO Tools
MSN has a wide array of new and interesting search marketing tools. Their biggest limiting factor with them is that they have limited search market share.
Some of the more interesting tools are
• Keyword Search Funnel Tool - shows terms that people search for before or after they search for a particular keyword
• Demographic Prediction Tool - predicts the demographics of searchers by keyword or site visitors by website
• Online Commercial Intention Detection Tool - estimates the probability of a search query or web page being commercial, informational-transactional, or
• Search Result Clustering Tool - clusters search results based on related topics
You can view more of their tools under the demo section at Microsoft's Adlab.
They have MSN Search, Microsoft AdCenter, and Windows Live Search. All these things are pretty much the same thing and are meshed together, the only difference between them is that Microsoft does not know what brand they want to push.
From search marketing perspective if you do standard textbook SEO practices and actively build links it is reasonable to expect to be able to rank well in MSN within about a month. If you are trying to rank for highly spammed keyword phrases keep in mind that many of the top results will have thousands and thousands of spammy links. The biggest benefit to new webmasters trying to rank in Microsoft is how quickly they rank new sites which have shown inbound link bursts.
One note of caution with Microsoft Search is that they are so new to the market that they are rapidly changing their relevancy algorithms as they try to play catch up with Yahoo! and Google, both of which had many years of a head start on them. Having said that, expect that sometimes you will rank where your site does not belong, and over time some of those rankings may go away. Additionally sometimes they may not rank you where you do belong, and the rankings will continue to shift to and fro as they keep testing new technologies.
Microsoft has a small market share, but the biggest things a search marketer has to consider with Microsoft are their vast vats of cash and the dominance on the operating system front.
So far they have lost many distribution battles to Google, but they picked up Amazon.com as a partner, and they can use their operating system software pricing to gain influence over computer manufacturer related distribution partnerships.
The next version of Internet Explorer will integrate search into the browser. This may increase the overall size of the search market by making search more convenient, and boost Microsoft's share of the search pie. This will also require search engines to bid for placement as the default search provider, and nobody is sitting on as much cash as Microsoft is.
Microsoft has one of the largest email user bases. They have been testing integrating search and showing contextually relevant ads in desktop email software. Microsoft also purchased Massive, Inc., a firm which places ads in video games.
Microsoft users tend to be default users who are less advertisement adverse than a typical Google user. Even though Microsoft has a small marketshare they should not be overlooked due to their primitive search algorithms (and thus ease of relevancy manipulation), defaultish users, and potential market growth opportunity associated with the launch of their next web browser.
Learn More
• MSN Guidelines for Successful Indexing
• MSN Site Owner Help
• MSN Search Blog
• MSN AdCenter Blog
• Microsoft AdLab
• Microsoft Research
Worker Blogs
• Robert Scoble - he is probably known as one of the top 10 bloggers, but after working for Microsoft for years he left on June 10th, 2006.

Restrict Your Google Search

Now you can add another functionality to the Google search, you can see the result catches under certain date. Go for a normal search in google and type a search string on the google search box, press enter.

1. Add “&as_qdr=(d)” to the URL displaying on the address bar after your search

2. Another pop up will appear beside the search box, showing the date

3. Now you can choose and limit the search query according to your need

Enjoy :)

Ranking Factors of Major players - Part 2

Yahoo!

Yahoo has been in the market from 1994 founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang as a directory. In the starting they are providing there search results to other third party but they have acquired it as they feel the importance of search market.

Yahoo pays importance to onpage content, if you are well optimized your meta elements you will rank high, yahoo does this to support his paid results to look as organic.

Yahoo can crawl deeply as far as link popularity is concern but may face difficulty if two or more number of special characters is present in the URLs.

All the words in the search keyword is considered in yahoo. For example if you are searching for “ how to find hotel” , it will try to search for “how” +”to”+”find”+”hotel” unlike google which give priority to semantics of the words of them and neglect common stuff words. Yahoo! puts quite a bit of weight even on common words that occur in the search query.

A good number of back link irrespective of there quality, focused anchor text, trust scores these is what yahoo still paying attention

Inbound links to a particular page and links to that site, yahoo consider both. Pages of a new sites have a chance to rank well if they manage to collect good number of descriptive inbound links

Site age is not a matter for yahoo as compare to Google. A page of 2 to 3 month can have a good rank on yahoo organic result page.

Inclusion to yahoo directory, yahoo paid results is manually edited. Yahoo also review there search query for in many industry for some competitive search queries. Some of the top search result may be hand coded. Yahoo also manually reviews some of the spammed categories.

Yahoo buyed del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. They are also having a similar kind of there own product My Yahoo!, yahoo answers a question answering service.
Yahoo! has a number of useful SEO tools.
• Overture Keyword Selector Tool - shows prior month search volumes across Yahoo! and their search network.
• Overture View Bids Tool - displays the top ads and bid prices by keyword in the Yahoo! Search Marketing ad network.
• Yahoo! Site Explorer - shows which pages Yahoo! has indexed from a site and which pages they know of that link at pages on your site.
• Yahoo! Mindset - shows you how Yahoo! can bias search results more toward informational or commercial search results.
• Yahoo! Advanced Search Page - makes it easy to look for .edu and .gov backlinks
o while doing link:http://www.site.com/page.html searches (links to an individual page)
o while doing linkdomain:www.site.com/ searches (links to any page on a particular domain)
• Yahoo! Buzz - shows current popular searches

Ranking Factors of Major players- Part 1

Owner of an online business! You must be dreaming about no 1 position in major players like Google, Yahoo, MSN. If you are already having any idea about search engine optimization and know how effective SEO can be for your business then you should be aware of what are the important factors. And how to well stood in this high competition.

The 1st part though most of us ignore is to understand the behavior of the major SE’s. the recent market study shows 61.6 % of the search market is occupied by Google, 20.4% by yahoo, 9.1 % by MSN and rest by other search engines.

The question is, is there any different strategy of the search engines to rank sites or all of them follows the same, before some days I was working for one of the inhouse site for the keyword Like “web development company” this was ranking well in google where poorly ranking in yahoo and no where found in msn. A common thinking there may exist in many of us that as we are optimizing our site for the Google, it will be well ranked in others too. I was completely proofed my self. No all of them have there own style of giving rank to the results and most of them have their own different algorithm. Don’t be in confusion and don’t think that you have been banned in that search engine for which you are not ranking.

Let’s discuss some of the important aspect upon which engines rely upon.
The factor we will discuss here.
1. onpage content
2. Crawling
3. query processing
4. link reputation
5. Page vs site
6. Site age
7. paid search
8. editorial
9. social aspect
10. SEO tools
11. business prospective
12. marketing perspective

To be frank I have collected all the information from seobook.com article written by Aaron Wall on June 13, 2006 , I have just divided it search engine wise and tried to put it in my own style.

So friend I will post what Aaron Wall is saying about yahoo in my next post. Stay Tuned.

Google showing numeric data

It's no more a headach to get the exact search voume of a keyword. Those who are all been using wordtracker, seobook, digitalpoint to know how many times the keyword is being searched on the web they can now use the google adword tool. Instead of the the Green bar which was showing only Low,  Avrage, high search volume is now showing numbers.  Don't know how far it's reliable and how effective will be if we will use this, let's hope for the best.

The googles tool can be used by both who are having a addword account as well as those don't have.

Here are the tools which one can use along with google adword external keyword tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/