So Cuil is on its way to fame and glory, and maybe even a couple bucks. The business model remains a mystery, so all that remains is to poke at the thing with a stick. Plenty of search pundits are testing it for accuracy, but I'm already quite satisfied with its entertainment potential.

I'm talking about those sample images with every listing. A few clicks will show you that many of these image matches are not pulled from the pages they lead to. Some sort of Cuil logic is at work here.

Perhaps Carlin's ghost is in the machine - you be the judge.

Posted in Tags: cuil, humor, image search 0 comments    

Cuil was thoughtful enough to supply a webmaster guidelines page from Day 1, presumably to declare a preemptive truce with the SEO community.

Well, let's return the favor by getting them a subscription to Webmaster World - you know, those 5 year old threads about how cloaking would work perfectly if we only had a complete list of the crawler's IP addresses.

A list like this...

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Posted in Tags: humor 0 comments    

Video search has a long way to go before the technology actually works. But another questions is sitting in the background: even if the tech gets sorted out, will consumers use a search box they way they now use a remote? I've posted some thoughts on Search Engine Land - check it out.

Could there be anything specific to the online video experience that differentiates it from other forms of web content? Certainly, we see variations in conventional media. People consume print media very differently from television, and that difference might have an analog in the online space.

Check it out:
Searching For "Kitten Videos?" Me Neither

Posted in Tags: seo, video search 0 comments    

Companies are starting to realize that people are flocking to online video, spending their couch time staring down at a laptop, Cheetos on hot stand-by. Scary news if you're a TV network - so what do you do? Try to build a video portal of your own. Only sexier! And more sophisticated! And... ooops - they just lost their audience.

Search engines can't find clips inside that fancy all-in-one video players. What's the alternative?

Individual landing pages for every video in their inventory. This reflects our newfound priority, which is to provide a variety of entry points that attract a wider viewing audience. In case this all sounds familiar, it's because this is exactly what YouTube does. Before YouTube was a Google property, one of its top priorities was to achieve widespread visibility in search results.

Here's the rest:
The Trouble With All-In-Zero Video Players

Posted in Tags: seo, video search 0 comments