07.29.08
Posted in Online Marketing at 4:33 am by Jono
Yesterday saw the announcement of a brand new search engine called Cuil (pronounced “cool”).
They bill themselves as the biggest search engine on the Internet – attesting to search more pages than anyone else (three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft). No doubt a bold claim and potential fighting-talk. 
I was under the impression Google had found roughly a trillion pages… not sure I can be bothered to count them – so I’ll take their word for it. Cuil claim to have 120-billion pages in their index which is far short of this. (Although not all of Google’s trillion appear in their index).
Cuil aims to provide results which are organised based on web page content analysis. In their own words:
Cuil provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. The search engine goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.
In terms of their philosophy, Cuil reckon that their newly developed architecture and algorithms are far more robust and able to handle the rapidly mushrooming Internet and organise the results in a way that reflect its enormous complexity…
They outline their four guiding principles as:
- Size matters and bigger is better – they claim to index everything and therefore provide more accurate results.
- Popularity is useful but not necessarily important – relevancy is more than a numbers game.
- Organisation is pivotal. Instead of ‘ten blue links’ Cuil reckon they organises the information by context.
- Analysis for the web, not the users – they analyse the pages not click-throughs.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but, I’ve always been under the impression that Google’s guiding-light has always been relevance to the user. I also think that they’ve come a long way from counting links.
Relevance and context is the way the web has been moving anyway with refinements such as XHTML and the advent of notions such as a semantic web and latent indexing.
I guess I just think it’s a little arrogant of Cuil to imply that user experience is lacking on major SEs like Google, where I think it’s clear for all to see that the focus has always been on the user. In fact, it’s top of their Ten Things about Google list.
In terms of appearance, the Cuil interface looks pretty good. I’m not entirely convinced though. Sure, they’ve got fancy roll-overs and pretty pictures – but when you click on those results, often the image isn’t even on the page.
I will say, that SEs focusing on visual results perhaps do offer something a little different to what we’ve come to expect from the likes of Google, MSN Live and Yahoo!, but does this equate to quality and relevance?
I doubt it.
In my opinion, Cuil is a nice try, but I really think they have a long way to go before they can really compete with the big boys.
In the world of search it’s about relevance and speed – I’m not sure they provide either.
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07.26.08
Posted in AlterSage at 6:31 am by Carla Fourie
The “Sage” team keeps growing
We welcome to the team Jonathan Andrews, who joined AlterSage Consultants on Monday in the capacity of eMarketing Strategist. Not shy to dive straight in, Jonathan already published his first blog post on the AlterSage blog on Thursday.
Jonathan is well experienced in the online industry, having previously worked at two online travel companies and a communications company. Before starting his voyage in the online industry, Jonathan obtained a B.A. Cultural and Literary Studies from UCT and a HDip Journalism and Media Studies (Post Grad) from Rhodes. After his studies he travelled to the UK and Canada where he did random jobs where the travel bug lead him.
Jonathan chose the online industry as he enjoys learning and trying new things. The constant new developments in the online industry attracted him, and of course the fact that one can see results from your efforts. In order to stay up to date with the online industry, he enjoys spending time on Bizcommunity.com, Search Engine Watch, emarketer.com, imediaconnection.com and SEOMoz to name a few.
On Friday afternoon we had Charly’s Bakery “mucking afazing” cupcakes and drinks to officially welcome Jonathan as a “Sage.”
We are sure that you can look forward to many more great posts from Jonathan on our blog.
Be sure to join the AlterSage Facebook group to keep informed of what the “Sages” are up to
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07.24.08
Posted in Info, Resources at 11:14 am by Jono
The problem of credibility and finding trusted sources for information online has plagued the WWW since forever. In recent years, it’s become easier and easier for anyone to publish anything.
Of course, in many community-driven websites such as Wikis – users provide the checks and balances by modifying and weeding out any inconsistencies or blatant fabrications by editing and contributing to articles. Although great in principle, this has been open to abuse too as we’ve seen in the past. (There’s a reason GWB’s Wikipedia entry is not available to edit)
Now, in the interests of providing a source for sound information from those in the know, Google has introduced the Knol . The Google blog reported yesterday that the Knol is now open to everyone.
So what is a Knol? Simply, a unit of knowledge.
They are authoritative articles about a specific topic. The key principle behind these Knols is authorship. Each Knol will have its own author,voice and opinions, and according to the Google Blog, they expect to have multiple Knols on the same topic.
In some ways, a Knol retains some elements of a Wiki - in that authors can collaborate – and readers too can make suggested modifications. However, authors can then moderate these changes before they are made public.
The major distinction is that a Knol will have an author(s) name associated with it – and it will remain their decision as to what is published on their Knol. So, Knols will not necessarily be community driven.
The Knols are published under Creative Commons Licences, users can write reviews, post comments and rate articles too – so there’s still that element of commentary.
Will these become the go-to information resources online? Time will tell, but I certainly think this is a good step forward in separating the fact from the fiction online.
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