Paul Wille Consulting, Inc

Anna Patterson (an “inventor” of search algorithms) developed her own search engine in 2004, which was so impressive that Google bought it up to upgrade elements of their own search. Today, she launched another project dubbed “Cuil” (pronounced “cool”). And this time she says Cuil isn’t for sale.

There are plenty of news stories about this search engine, so I’m going to focus on a few key elements that I think are worth a look at:

1. More robust approach to relevancy

Unlike other major search engines that use quality and quantity of web links within content, Cuil actually drills down into the pages they link to and analyzes the content of that page for relevancy. Seems simple enough, and certainly a good idea to get past ridiculous SEO link tactics used these days. I appreciate this – its aggrevating reading a page with unnecessary links within a paragraph. I also suspect (although I haven’t verified) that if this is perfected it will easily contend the more traditional approach.

2. “Article”-based search results

Rather than a list of text-only links, photos and paragraph snippets of content are returned as part of the search results. When interacting with a search engine, most results returned do not contain enough information to qualify the result in the user’s mind. Cuil does a nicer job of this, although it does mean more reading for the user.

3. Dynamic Faceted Searching

Faceted searching is the concept of narrowing search results based on multiple “facets” or aspects of your search results. For instance, if I search for “Portland, Oregon”, a few facets that I could narrow my results by would include “Neighborhoods in Portland”, “Municipal Parks in Portland”, etc. Faceted searching has been around for a few years in mainstream merchandising websites, but its just appearing in search engines (Ask.com is using this in a more simplified form). This is probably the best part of this engine in my opinion. And even though it could still use some refinement, the first view of it is good.

4. Privacy

Cuil promises to not store search history by user, and believes that this will attract users to their search engine too. Although I appreciate this, I don’t think there will be many people coming to Cuil simply because of this.

So where is this thing going? Well with $33 million in VC, I think Cuil will be an interesting story to watch. But even if Anna says Cuil isn’t for sale, what’s the likelihood of it becoming mainstream? I do enjoy routing for the underdog, but in this space its hard to not be very doubtful.

If nothing else, its another clever idea to diversify the search landscape. And for that, I appreciate Anna’s concept and the $33 million backing her.

This April 7th, I’m going to be a panelist at the Oregon Governor’s Conference at the Expo Center in Portland, Oregon. The topic? Analytics. But its not about conversions, conversion funnels, and measuring intended “action” on a website. No, we are talking about something that has been on my mind for a bit actually…engagement metrics.
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A good friend and colleague of mine (Mo from TravelOregon.com) in the Travel and Tourism industry notified me about the new VisitFlorida.com website today. Having worked on the TravelOregon.com website myself as well as a number of other travel-related websites, I have to say I’m pretty floored by the VisitFlorida folks for their extreme “web 2.0″ approach to their new site, even if I don’t personally agree it makes for the best user experience.

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Hawaiian Airlines just launched their new website about a week ago. You know, I really like it when I see a company break the mould of their online presence that all their competitors follow. The site is inviting, easy, and provides great tools that travelers need when planning their trip. Best of all, note how they do not show photos of the tail-section of an aircraft (which historically has been so prevalent on airline websites). What does a tail-section have to do with my vacation?

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