A mate was twittered about the results on Cuil for a search for lolcat. Note that it wasn’t a search for lolcats plural. Just lolcat singular.

You’d think that would be worksafe. But it’s not.

The fact that Cuil displays an image next to each website in the results list, can lead to nasty surprises.
They need to have some kind of reporting and instant removal of unpleasant images.
I would not be happy for my kids to see the image returned.
It’s not for the official lolcats site - icanhascheezburger.com. It’s a different site. No need to mention it. But it’s adult.

On a related note, I can imagine people experimenting to see how they can control the image that is displayed next to their website. Getting a shocking image displayed could be a kind of linkbait - traffic attention-seeking.

As with all search engines, SEOs will be attempting to reverse-engineer the algorithm, to see how they can get their results at the top. Yet another area for people to specialise in. It will be interesting to see how much traffic Cuil gets. Fairly negative feedback so far.

Just heard about the new search engine, Cuil. Well it ain’t.

The logical first step was to search for my own sites. Especially those that rank well at the traditional major search engines.

sydney web design - www.sydney-web-design.com managed page 6 at cuil. Pity they couldn’t find the right web site image to display. Not sure why they displayed ireckon’s instead. Fail.

online shopping australia - gee, it displayed my old domain, best-australian.com, on page 1. Shucks, it even had my own content. Strange though. That content hasn’t existed since November 2007. Is that when they spidered it? The new owner only has crap ads. Fail.

mydogspace - well the .com.au doesn’t get a mention for a few pages. Strange. It’s number 1 at Google. And you’d have to say pretty relevant. Fail.

halloween australia - Cuil displays my sydney-web-design site. Cos I list my halloween site in my portfolio. Pity they didn’t have enough nous to display the actual relevant site. Fail.

Even more annoying is the way the data appears on my screen. I have a modest 17 inch screen. The bottom few rows of Cuil don’t fit on my screen, and I have to page down all the time. And the links to the next search results are so small you miss them at first.

Getting close to epic fail cuil guys.

Gotta say Google is tough on a girl sometimes.

I have a couple of sites that I would have to say were optimised for search engines.

Halloween Australia in particular, was hand-built with SEO in mind. Obviously creating a useful, interesting site was the most important thing, and I built a Halloween Events search-by-suburb function, so you can find local events and trick or treating streets. But the URL, page names, title, description, keywords, headings and content and image text were sprinkled with the targetted keywords. I even made it source-ordered, so that content appears before navigation, a true sign of an SEO-addict.

And MSN loves it. Number one for “halloween australia”. Yahoo is also pretty good - a strong page 1 result. But Google is sluggish. It has gradually crept up to page 2 on Google, but given that the whole site is dedicated to halloween in Australia, you’d think it would rate better than some of the others on the page, where halloween is a small part of a site.

The Christmas site is a little different. It’s a Drupal site, so it has a bit more overhead code than I would have chosen - so there’s a bit more stuff for spiders to wade through (lots of file includes), before getting to the content. But the URL, meta info and content are definitely oriented towards Christmas Australia. And yes, MSN loves it again (#1), Yahoo is page 1, and Google is languishing.

Yes, there is more competition for Christmas websites.

But the twist is that Christmas Australia is a replacement for an old site of mine that used to rank number 1 or 2 at Google, for the chosen keywords. Until I lost the domain when the renewal went astray. So if content really was king, the replacement site should have been ranking up near page one.

Back when I created the original site, I wrote a poem about Christmas in Australia, to add some original content to the front page. It really did give a significant boost to my rankings back then. And it’s been fun seeing my poem get quoted on a few other sites.

Most of the problems at Google would be off-page related. The domain is not very old and it doesn’t have enough incoming links. I corresponded with a few sites who used to link to my old site, and they said they would move the links across, but Google doesn’t appear to acknowledge these links.

The risk is that there is some old duplicate content hanging around from the old site, causing Google to ignore the new site.

I still have a few more functions and content I’d like to add, before I submit a reconsideration request to Google. It’s getting close to the time of year where you concentrate on Christmas sites - a few months before you need it.

So on the surface, I’m good at building sites for MSN and Yahoo. Google just needs to be slowly reminded that there is some good content there.