July 2008: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from July 2008: 1) Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google? – Can any start-up search engine "be the next Google?" Many have wondered this, and today’s launch of Cuil (pronounced "cool") may provide the best test case since Google itself overtook more […]

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Below are
Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular
stories from July 2008:

1) Cuil Launches —
Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?
– Can any start-up search
engine "be the next Google?" Many have wondered this, and today’s launch of
Cuil (pronounced "cool") may provide the best test case since Google itself
overtook more established search engines. Cuil provides what appears to be a
comprehensive index of the web, offers a unique display presentation, and
emerges at a time when people might be ready to embrace a quality "underdog"
service. The big questions now are how does the relevancy hold up and can
word-of-mouth really still build significant share? [Note: The Cuil site was
supposed to be live for searches at of 9:01pm Pacific time on July 27, but so
far I’m still seeing only a holding page. I’d expect this to change fairly
soon].

===================

2) The Day After:
Looking At How Well Knol Pages Rank On Google
– We’ve been assured
that just because content sits on Google’s Knol site, it won’t gain any
ranking authority from being part of the Knol domain. OK, so a day after Knol
has launched, how’s that holding up? I found 1/3 of the pages listed on the
Knol home page that I tested ranked in the top results. I came away feeling
that being on Knol does indeed give pages an advantage they might not get if
they’d been hosted on some other brand new web site.

===================

3) Cuil Fast Test –
Relevancy Isn’t A Google Killer
– Now that Cuil is live, I wanted to
do a few fast queries to get a sense of how it seems to stack up against
Google. With the huge caveat that nine queries are far from letting anyone
conclude anything, I still didn’t come away with a sense that Cuil has Google-beating
relevancy. Instead, it has some flaws though is better than many start-up
search engines appear out of the box. Queries I tried:

===================

4) Google’s Knol
Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation
– After six months of
testing, Google has formally rolled out Knol, a service designed to let people
create pages of knowledge on any topic they choose. While Google says Knol is
not designed to compete with Wikipedia — and there are good arguments to back
this up — I still think the easiest way to describe the service is Wikipedia
with moderation. Below, more about this, the service in general, and some of
the issues it may raise for Google.

===================

5) Google Maps
Walking Directions Now Live
– Earlier this month, I reported that
Google Maps was testing walking directions on a small subset of users. This
morning, I noticed that Google Maps now is offering walking directions for all
Google Maps users. For example, conduct a search for 200 Madison Ave to 200
Lexington Ave and you will see the option to take "Walking" directions as
opposed to driving directions. Here is a picture:

===================

6) Google Trends
Showing A Swastika (卐)?
– Dave Shaw notified me of a weird character
being displayed as a "hot trend" on Google Trends this morning. It appears
that Google is displaying a swastika as 卐. This appears to be some sort of
Chinese character, but the swastika is well known for its usage in Nazi
Germany and has been a very controversial symbol since. Here is a picture of
Google Trends at the time I write this:

===================

7) Search Volume
Comes To Google Keyword Tool & Live Search Updates
– I reported at the
Search Engine Roundtable that Google has added search volume numbers to the
external keyword tool. The volume numbers are approximations, and I would
guess are from the same sources Google obtains data for Google Ad Planner and
Google Trends for Websites. Here is a screen capture of a keyword research
search on [seo]:

===================

8) Google Ranking
(Partly) Explained
– Google has historically been criticized for being
a black box. But for the past couple of years the company has been trying to
be more transparent in key areas (Matt Cutts in particular has been very
helpful here). As the latest in a series of such posts, Amit Singhal, who runs
the Google "ranking" team in search quality, discusses the "philosophies"
behind Google ranking.

===================

9) Yahoo! Lets You
"Build Your Own Search Service"
– Yahoo! has just unveiled the next
phase in their plan to spur search innovation by providing search-related
resources to developers. The Yahoo! Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS)
enables developers to access Yahoo! search results, combine them with other
sources, rerank them, and define their appearance. Yahoo! says they are making
BOSS available in an attempt to spur innovation in the search space and
disrupt the market. They point out that unlike with other web companies, a
search startup has many obstacles: from cost (it takes a lot of machines to
process all the web’s data) to expertise (some of the world’s smartest PhDs
work at the major search engines) to historical data (which search companies
can only get a hold of by that old-fashioned method of waiting). Below, more
on what Yahoo! is making available through BOSS and how likely it is that the
launch will really create the next Google.

===================

10) SEO For Semantic
Search Engines
– A new generation of search engines is starting to
become publicly available, so it’s time to start thinking about how it will
affect SEO efforts. The new search engines I’m talking about are the semantic
search engines, meaning they are search engines that can be queried using
natural language (not keywords like when using Google). Behind the scenes,
these search engines try to understand the meaning behind the text web pages
and so when you query them, they map what your query means and find answers
based on the meaning they’ve extracted. It’s all very neat, and there are many
examples: Powerset (which Microsoft recently acquired), Hakia, [true
knowledge], Cognition, and a few others.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our
Most
Popular Stories
page.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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