Organic SEO Blog

A startup business, Cuil Inc., founded by engineers from Google Inc. and other tech giants are launching a new search engine that claims to cover three times as many Web pages as Google. The site’s results page resembles an online magazine — a different look and feel from search juggernaut Google’s.

try www.cuil.com (pronounced “cool”)

Cuil has raised $33 million from venture-capital investors and has a deep bench of career search engineers, including Ms. Patterson and her co-founder and husband, Tom Costello. Mr. Costello built search technology for International Business Machines Corp. and was on the research faculty at Stanford University.

As a business proposition, Cuil is obviously a big bet. While search is a monetizable business, it’s hard to change the behavior of a generation of Web users who think “Google” is a verb. No other search engine has come close to entering the public consciousness like this. Of course, Cuil doesn’t have to trounce Google on day one; and took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.

A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.

Google has recently unveiled Knol to the world, touted as their answer to Wikipedia, which is expected to be a more professional version of Wikipedia, put together by expert writers. The biggest difference between Knol and Wikipedia are that the authors will be identified by their real names, and will be verified.

Authoritative articles in knol are expected to rank high in search engines, and could potentially be used as a link baiting tool to build links to your site. Though all outgoing links from knol have nofollow added to them, this is definitely going to be a major traffic source in future, and if used properly, this traffic could potentially get a few back links to your site.

Comon… itz time to knol, start sharing what you know

For most people on the Web, if Google or Yahoo cannot find something, it doesn’t exist. That has been one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a Website in Flash. Search engines could see the file, but they could not see what was in it. Until now.

Adobe today announced an optimized Adobe Flash Player that will be added to the search engines of Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. under agreements with the two Internet firms. The tool will help the search engines better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIA) that include the Flash file format, or Shockwave Flash (SWF).

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

Having failed to acquire Yahoo, Microsoft has now apparently set its sights on a new target, and is rumored to be eying a $100 million acquisition of powerset.com, a natural language-based search engine that is only usable on Wikipedia and Freebase.

One has to now wonder how much of a boost in the search market the acquisition will net them over time :), as we know that Google has been a bit dismissive about semantic search and it didn’t do much for Ask Jeeves either. Anyways, this could at the very least help Microsoft distinguish itself in the search space, but with all the hundreds of millions they’ve already spent beefing up their search engine perhaps their problem isn’t technological as much as it is a branding issue.

comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace. Google Sites marginally extended its share of core searches to 58.5 percent. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 22.2 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.8 percent), AOL LLC (4.9 percent), and Ask Network (4.5 percent).

comScore Core Search Report* - January 2008
Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0Share of Searches (%)

Core Search Entity              Dec-07          Jan-08            Change
Total Core Search                  100.0%          100.0%            0.0
Google Sites                        58.4%           58.5%            0.1
Yahoo! Sites                        22.9%           22.2%           -0.7
Microsoft Sites                      9.8%            9.8%            0.0
AOL LLC**                            4.6%            4.9%            0.3
Ask Network                          4.3%            4.5%            0.2

*  Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
cross-channel searches.  Searches for mapping, local directory, and
user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
** In January 2008, Time Warner Network was split into two distinct
properties: AOL LLC and Time Warner Network excluding AOL, with AOL LLC
representing the core search business.

Global giants including Apple and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are believed to be considering rival bids for the internet company Yahoo, which has received a $44.6bn (£22.6bn) offer from Microsoft.

The conglomerate InterActiveCorp was another company named as a potential bidder for Yahoo, which is said to be unwilling to give in to Microsoft without a fight.

After Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer made the offer in a letter on Thursday, it emerged that Yahoo had rejected a similar takeover attempt by Ballmer’s organisation a year before.

Yahoo chief executive and co-founder Jerry Yang is understood not to be Microsoft’s greatest fan, and would be prepared to line up another ‘white knight’ rather than concede to Ballmer.

It is believed he would be particularly open to a rescue bid from Steve Jobs’ Apple Corp, having openly expressed his admiration for the firm in the past.

Although Microsoft is still the leading technology company in the world, it is believed its position could soon be threatened if it doesn’t turn around its loss-making internet arm and increase its share of the online advertising market.

Recent figures show that Google dominates 66% of the global web search market. Yahoo and Microsoft are leagues behind with just 13% and 4% of the market respectively.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850

Wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2008.

“Another fresh new year is here . . .
Another year to live!
To banish worry, doubt, and fear,
To love and laugh and give!

This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest . . .
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!

I have the opportunity
Once more to right some wrongs,
To pray for peace, to plant a tree,
And sing more joyful songs!”

comScore, Inc. , the leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace. Among core search engines in September 2007, Google Sites remained the top search property with more than 5.3 billion core searches conducted, representing a 57 percent share of the search market. Along with Google, both Yahoo! Sites and Ask Network posted share gains during the month.

Share of Searches (%)
Google Sites 57.0%
Yahoo! Sites 23.7%
Microsoft Sites 10.3%
Ask Network 4.7%
Time Warner Network 4.3%
Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches.

Microsoft has launched an experimental search site Tafiti.com that uses Silverlight 1.0 to display Windows Live search results. The search experience is unlike most of other interfaces that are currently found on the Web, and the graphics on the home page have a similar look and feel to the GUI of Windows Vista.

The result page also includes a box for entering a search topic on the left hand side of the screen, which is created to look like the top of a piece of looseleaf paper, with a blank white section in the center with the heading “Web” where search results appear.

On the right is a notepad-like application that Microsoft calls a “shelf,” with thumbnail-sized screenshots of what look like Web pages.

The aim of Tafiti just seems to showcase the power of Microsoft Silverlight, and there is no improvement in the awkward search results returned by Windows Live Search

Search engines help people find web pages on a given subject. Millions and millions of searches are conducted each and every day on search engines by people all around the world.

What do people search? What are they looking for?

Following are some of the data provided by major search engines that’ll help us understand about what people actually search
Google Zeitgeist - Collection of lists of the most frequent search queries. There are weekly, monthly and yearly lists, as well as topic and country specific lists.

Yahoo Buzz Log - Buzz Log a good way to keep up with what’s going on, both online and in the real world. It is a service developed by Yahoo! to draw conclusions based on data taken from the Yahoo Search. Each week the Buzz Log is updated with the latest search data and correlations to various real world occurrences.

AOL Hot Searches - Latest hot search topics and current, most searched news on AOL Search. Find top current queries, or see those in the last hour, last day and within particular categories.

Ask IQ - See the most popular search terms each week based on millions of Ask.com searches.

Dogpile SearchSpy - Real-time data on terms searched on dogpile.com

Lycos Top50 - Weekly data of Top 50 searches on Lycos search network.