I was checking out Cuil.com tonight, the new search engine from some ex-google employees. I decided to test it against Google, and I searched for the term “ellybabes”.
Whilst Cuil (pronounced “cool”) does return more results than Google (12,929 vs c.12,300), I think its ranking algorithms could do with some work yet. As Twenty commented, you would expect the domain names containing your search term to be reported first, ranking over brief mentions or links from other people. On Cuil, my domain only turned up towards the end of the first page of results.
By contrast, Google knows that my blog (blog.ellybabes.com), even on a subdomain, is more important and gets more traffic than my homepage (ellybabes.com), and ranks them accordingly. On the first page of Google results I get the following:
- My blog main page
- One of my blog sub-pages
- My domain homepage
- My Twitter homepage
- A link from my husband
- My P45 forum account
- My mobile Twitter homepage
- My Tumblr
- My Jaiku account
- My Stumbleupon account
Not perfect, but a good capture of my digital life, and certainly enough to help you find me.
However, on Cuil, it’s a very different story…
- Onlinemeetingrooms’ Jaiku account
- A half-dozen Technorati searches for other people
- The “Memories” category on my blog (a category with only 1 post in it)
- My Twitter account
- My Touristr profile (barely used, sorry Jan)
- The “About” page of my blog (very bottom of first results page)
- My account on DotNetKicks.com (I don’t even remember registering for one)
Cuil.com is certainly something to keep an eye on, but I wouldn’t be relying on it to compete with Google yet.
Oh, and the title of this post? Well that came up when I visited Google for some ego searching. Apparently someone has decided to bid on “ellybabes” as an AdWord, in order to return sponsored links for “Alibaba” - weird, huh?
