Ex-Googlers launch Cuil, world's "biggest search engine"

There's yet another new search engine on the block, but this time, it's being ballyhooed as an actual challenger to Google. Cuil.com (pronounced "cool") made its public launch today and already calls itself the "biggest search engine on the web." Run by a team of former Google employees, the startup takes a slightly different approach to search than most of the big names, but whether it will be able to unseat Google—or even Yahoo—remains to be seen.

Right off the bat, the Cuil team makes a number of direct comparisons to Google, but often without actually naming the Big G. For one, Cuil brags that it has already indexed 120 billion Web pages, roughly three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. "Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics" like Google does, Cuil's info page says that the site contextually analyzes each page and organizes search results based on content and relevance.

When you search for a particular keyword, Cuil attempts to group the results into relevant categories. As you can see from my screenshot below, searching for "chinchilla" produces tabs for "all results," "chinchilla food," "chinchilla supplies," and "chinchilla fur" across the top. An "Explore by Category" box on the right-hand side of the results page offers a number of further associations (in this case, related to the Australian town of Chinchilla in Queensland). More......

What Kinds of Changes Were Made to Google PageRank?

In May, blogged about Google VP of Engineering Udi Manber's post where he introduced search quality. In the same post, he says that Google has "made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January." Last week, Matt Cutts told us that we're in the midst of a PageRank update, and now forum members are wondering what kinds of changes were made to the PR algorithm. In a WebmasterWorld thread, Tedster says that he thinks that a few things may have been altered:

1. Internal links and external links on the same page may not be splitting the PageRank vote equally.
2. Depending on the location of the link, PR may be weighted differently.
3. Multiple links to the same url from the same page may not each get the same piece of the PR vote.
4. "Run-of-site" external links, like Blogrolls, may now have diminished PR.
5. Links between domains that Google sees as "related" may have their PR significantly damped down. Possibly the same goes for sites that link to subdomains.

Are Ted's observations correct? Some of the ideas he proposed may be difficult to fathom. For example, subdomains that are not owned by the same user (think blogspot here) may interlink, and why shouldn't their PR count?

A lot of these ideas are simply that: ideas. They're based on conjecture and not on evidence. Some forum members find that it's important to actually test these theories before calling them as they seem to be.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.