Ideas for Business

Today marks the launch of brand new search engine Cuil. According to the founders, some of them ex-Googlers, the need for a new search engine is the fact that the Internet is growing and getting harder to index. That is true, but I’m not sure that I agree with the principle that bigger is better. Cuil claims to have a larger index than Google, though Google disagrees. I don’t think it matters how big your index is if you can’t deliver relevant results to users. To me, the quality of the search results is the most important thing. With that in mind, does Cuil do a good job?

Well, according to Grokdotcom, Cuil hasn’t done well with brands. I’d have to agree. A search for “small business mavericks” turned up a “we didn’t find any results” page. Type that into Google and we’ re No. 1.

I performed a search for a search term that I knew should turn up exactly what I was looking for. I knew it because I know that there is only one page on the entire web that specifically offers a particular product. Type that product name into Google and every result on page 1, except for one, is about that product. In position No. 1 is the page on which the product is offered by the company that produces it. The rest of the results are product reviews, interviews with radio personalities and publishers with the product developer, and bookmarks of the product page at sites like Mixx and Propeller. Typing the same query into Cuil delivered a bunch of results not related to the product at all and the only result that was related was one of the bookmarks. Propeller seems to be heavily weighted at Cuil as several of the top results for the few queries I presented were Propeller pages - even if the pages I’d consider most relevant weren’t represented.

To be fair, I did go back in and type in “small business mavericks” with the quotation marks and I’m all over the page. I guess if you’re going to search for a specific brand at Cuil then it helps to put quotes around that brand name, but I did this with the aforementioned product and got back the “we didn’t find any results” page.

It’s clear that Cuil has a way to go before it meets its goal of producing more relevant results than Google. It’s methodology is clearly different than Google, attempting to deliver the most relevant results and not the most popular. I agree that most relevant is better than most popular, but I don’t think you can achieve that in the manner than Cuil is attempting. They seem to have done away with the link analysis algorithms that Google has based its results on. There could be an argument made that Google relies on that too much, but Cuil likely doesn’t rely on it enough. Still, as Greg Sterling says, let’s give Cuil another year to see how it develops before we rush to judgment over its competitive ability against Google.

Check out these other blog posts about Cuil:

Danny Sullivan
Mel Carson
TechCrunch

My Home 2.0 is a TV show that gives families technology makeovers . You can catch season one’s episodes online. And if you live near Ft. Wayne, Indiana, stop by a Verizon store until the end of this month to try out to be one of the next season’s featured families,

Like many home makeover shows, My Home 2.0 finds real families with real needs. One such family is the Zaharkos with nine kids, who have one computer for 11 people. Their daughter Emily has fine motor skill problems and needs a PC with a touch screen like she has at school. The mom homeschools the kids until they’re in fourth grade and needs help organizing their schedules and delegating chores to the older kids. Sounds like the My Home 2.0 Gurus have their work cut out for them.

Since the show is sponsored by Verizon, they show products that will work with Verizon FiOS, super fast fiber-optic Internet access: PDAs, computer, digital cameras, HD TV, home theater systems, gaming consoles, etc. From what I’ve watched, the show doesn’t annoyingly plug Verizon, and tends to be more about how technology can help make families live better.

The Twittering Teddy Bear

The My Home 2.0 website is full of techno-helpful tips and DIY projects including the Twittering Teddy Bear. It’s not exactly a project for the faint at heart, but if you’re a techie who loves to mess around with circuit boards and wires, this may be for you. I’d be happy to donate my daughter’s neglected Teddy Ruxpin if you want.

How 2.0: Make a Twittering Teddy Bear from My Home 2.0 DIY on Vimeo.

Digg may soon allow publishers the chance to operate under the Digg umbrella by managing sub-Diggs. Is that good?

It can’t hurt. In fact, by allowing users to manage sub-Diggs, the largest social bookmarking site becomes that much more competitive and that’s a necessity in today’s highly competitive landscape. Secondly, if you are a publisher within a niche then you can run your own sub-Digg and control who lands on the front page of your sub-Digg. This is a powerful marketing opportunity for niche publishers who may not have a chance to ever hit Digg’s front page. If your cookie-dough-recipe website struggles with 1 or 2 Diggs per submission then you may get a little discouraged. But being able to manage your own sub-Digg for the niche of baking, or recipes, might give you a little bit of an advantage and you could see yourself getting more votes if you are able to promote your sub-Digg.

This is an interesting development, but don’t count your chickens yet. Read Write Web is reporting it could be six months.

A few days ago, Google rolled out a new product it calls Knol. Simply put, a knol is a unit of knowledge. What makes Knol such a good tool is the ability for anyone to collaborate on a body of knowledge with other experts in that area. If you are the publisher of a knol then you can control the content while still allowing others to contribute. That makes it a very powerful medium.

If you are not the publisher of the knol you can still contribute. Every member of the Knol community that contributes to a knol, whether it be their own or someone else’s, is marketing their business. Since you have to have a profile with Google Knol, and your profile allows you to link to your website, then you are able to contribute to useful knols in your niche and market your business at the same time.

You have to be careful, though, not to create a knol for the express purpose of marketing your business. I don’t expect that those will do very well. I do expect that knols that focus on providing valuable information first will be good marketing vehicles for others. I’d encourage you to seek out this opportunity to share your knowledge and to build a community around like-minded collaborators. Do it now and you’re in on the ground floor.

Learn more about Small Business Mavericks and our small business marketing plans.

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