Anna Patterson; a former leader of Google’s search indexing, Tom Costello; her husband who researched and studied search engines at Stanford University and IBM, and Russell Power; also worked at Google on search indexing, Web rankings and spam detection have come together to form Cuil. (pronounced ‘cool’)

Cuil claims to have indexed more pages than Google at a staggering 120 billion web pages. Google last month declared t had discovered over 1 trillion unique pages, but didn’t specify how many it had actually indexed. With insider knowledge at Google, we can only assume they’re right.

Cuil said its search engine goes beyond traditional approaches by analyzing the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity. Cuil then organizes similar results into groups and sorts them by category. It also offers tabs to clarify subjects, as well as suggestions on how to refine searches.

Check out Cuil here

Opinion? Cuil are trying something new which is always a good way to go about it. Google clones fall within days because they’re trying to copy and are always behind Google’s ever changing ideas. On the other hand, if the pronounciation of your name needs to be added afterwards, how are people going to communicate your brand effectively? It will have to develop its own pronounciation to avoid it being mistaken for its homophonic equivilent.

Testing it’s ‘context’ idea, I searched for ‘Two too to’and had a page of results, none of which talked about English grammar. An identical search on Google however came straight up top with n explanation of the homophones and common mistakes.

The site is also severely lacking features such as news and image search, but that’s exactly why people liked Google in the first place, it was simple, easy-to-use and effective. While testing, I did get a ‘our servers are running a bit hot message’ which is tech speak for, we can’t handle the pressure, but lets see where this leads… Watch this one closely I’d say. No one will beat Google in a day, but give them time and we’ll see what happens.

And why my wife’s site comes up with an image saying ‘born in Japan’ for example which is nowhere on the site is anybody’s guess.

Cuil isn’t the first Google rival to launch this year. Wikia Search, a highly anticipated search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, made its official debut in January. Wikia Search hopes to provide better search results by allowing a community of users to index pages by using their Web page rankings and other suggestions, as well as its own indexing of the Web.

Following Microsoft’s failed bid to buy Yahoo!, a deal is underway for Google to gain control over Yahoo’s search advertising. Presumably this means that Google adwords will spread to Yahoo! increasing coverage while removing choice. With Google taking over 90% of the internet advertising revenue, this would certainly impact on Microsoft’s Live Search wallets, but could wipe out existing smaller search engines and any future competition Google could ever have.

It would also affect smaller businesses in terms of getting a competitive deal on online advertising as the choices would be removed, prices could go up, the smaller voices would be muffled, and advertisers would have nowhere else to turn.

Yahoo! anticipates additional revenue from the deal, presumably Google will do too (else why make the deal) and all this extra cash is coming from somewhere.

Microsoft is making noises, they’ve been in court for similar practices with Micrsoft Windows Monopoly and now they want their own back. There are talks from their corner of price-fixing similar to the UK’s big supermarket agreements where minimum prices are set further hitting the smaller businesses. Microsoft’s best move now would be to file an antitrust lawsuit through the US Justice Department as happened to them prior to 2002 when the case was settled.

As there’s no merger, the Google Yahoo! partnership (hereafter known as Goohoo!) would not need to go through the US Justice dept. but they can challenge the agreement if it’s shown that competition would be stifled.

Goohoo! have agreed to give the deal a 2 1/2 month for the dust to settle and to back out if Yahoo! is ever bought. (Perhaps a collaborative effort to push Microsoft towards a higher bid?) They also deny any claims of potential price fixing and minimum ad costs.

Good idea? Bad idea? Your views and comments are welcome:

Sorry, another stolen blog, this time from Greg Howlett and can be found at MarketingPilgrim With Google and other Search Engines becoming more intelligent and concentrating on human content for human searches, is SEO really worth it’s money in the long run or will there always be a need?

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According to Shoemoney, SEO has no future. I do not always agree with him, but in this case, he is dead right. Let me pull on my flame retardant suit before I explain why.First, understand that the only reason SEO has ever worked is because search engines were not advanced enough to always show relevant information. I remember when I started selling online. At the time, I had only a few competitors in my industry and it was easy to beat them in the SEO game. It took only a few metatags and such, and within weeks, I was dominant.That went on for years. Back in those days, a monkey could have dominated search engines rankings. We moved from metatags to inbound links with the right anchor text and continued our domination. How easy was it? I basically knew during that period how many inbound links we needed to achieve top three rankings, and the results were uncannily consistent.

Eventually, the search engines got smarter, and ended the concept of guaranteed SEO dominance. Some people are still in denial. I still have SEO snake oil salesmen calling me trying to sell me link trading services.

Here is why SEO as we know it is going to continue its death spiral. Search engines are too smart and they have a different agenda. They do not want to reward crummy companies that play SEO games–they want to give the top listings to the best companies. And they are quickly gaining access to the information they need to do exactly that. They will use traffic and buying stats to figure out who the top companies are.

Take my industry of health supplements. Do you think Google wants to reward the SEO contortions of unknown companies and affiliates with lots of free business? Of course not–they want to send their visitors to the top supplement sites in the industry.

Within a year or two, they will be good at it. I can predict what supplement companies will be showing on the first page of Google soon. They will be the companies that have strong brands and lots of business. If you are not in the top ten of your industry, you had better find a way to get there in a hurry if you want to be on the first page of Google.

Yes, this means that the rich will get richer and the poor will starve for SEO traffic. If you are not in the first category, you had better find a way to get there quick. The middle class is about to disappear.

In my last article, I wrote about the importance of branding on the conversion rate. If you want a long term SEO strategy, guess where your focus should be? Yes, your branding. Forget the typical SEO tricks; focus instead on building your brand to a position where Google WANTS you on the front page of results.

If you absolutely have to hire an SEO expert, hire one that understands this truth. I think, however, that you would be better served by largely forgetting about SEO and focusing instead on building your brand.

Brilliant article written by Guy Levine. Original text here. He explains the difference between SEO and Adwords, that both are good, but when to effectively apply them.

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Welcome to the great debate: “Do I pay every time someone clicks on one of my little adverts on Google, ranging from 5p to £25 per click, or do I hire an expert to dominate the natural listings (the free ones on the left hand side)?” Guy Levine. chief executive of Web Marketing Advisor, gives us the lowdown.

Pay per click, Google adwords, search engine marketing and sponsored listings are all names for pay per click. You choose a word or phrase you want, you bid a price, then an advert is displayed when someone types the word or phrase into Google. When someone clicks, you pay.

Search engine optimisation – or SEO to the cool young internet types – is the process of inducing “Google love”. Basically, tweaking the pages of a website to make the search engines love them. I know there are other search engines, but at the moment Big G rules!

On the other hand, pay per click allows hungry entrepreneurs to have their websites ranking on the front page of search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) within as little as three hours. Yes, you have to pay but you get visibility. Another great benefit is that you can run multiple adverts, all 128 characters of them, to test the best hooks. Google will even tell you which one people love the most.

Search engine optimisation is the long game. You tweak your site, you wait for the search engines to update their listings, you tweak again, you wait. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong. But boy, when you get it right! The first result on page one is better than the icing on the cake, it’s internet nirvana.

Let me share one word of warning. It’s fine being number one, but you need to make sure you are number one for a word which people search when they want to buy, not just browse.

SEO, I love it, but my best advice is to always run a PPC campaign first. Choose your keywords, test them and make sure your site converts. When it does, crank up the SEO.

Get them both right and there’s gold there in them there hills!

Guy Levine is the chief executive of search engine optimisation firm Web Marketing Advisor.

Yet another potential web design client has come my way with Google adverts on their website. Promises of extra money, assumptions of better rankings and more professional look… tempted?

Don’t even think about it!

If you’re running the site deliberately to make money from advertising or a hobby site with advertising to pay for itself, fine. Even then you need one heck of a high hit rate for this to make any real money.

Google ads, and of course other automated advertising systems read the content of the site and choose relevent ads. If you’re an accountant, and trying to run ads on your business site, Google will quite happily pay you 20p to redirect your potential clients to your competitor’s website. Nobody wants that!… except of course your competitor.

When you’re discussing your design requirements with your web, graphics, or IT person, and you start to utter those words ‘Should I put those Google ads on my site?’ prepare to be shot.

• They don’t improve your Google listings
• They don’t look professional
• They don’t make your company or website look nice/big/clever/important
• They are links AWAY from your site and do not bring visitors in
• They will show up your competitors
• They will lose you business