Search engines July 29, 2008 at 5:53 am
It all started with an article in The Independent about a new search service started by 3 ex-Google employees. (quick aside: why does the headline refer to “Google old boys” while in the article they keep referring to a women who seems to be the leader or at least spokesperson of the 3?)
From there I had to, of course, check out the new search service which apparently searches three times as many pages as Google does. So I Googled “Cuiled” my favorite search term: “jimmy bouma-holtrop”.
Three pages worth of results came up.
Not one link to this blog. Now, I know this blog is new, but I’ve had a site at jimmy.bouma-holtrop.com and/or www.bouma-holtrop.com/jimmy for nearly 6 years. www.bouma-holtrop.com didn’t even come up. I really liked the format of the Cuil (pronounced “cool”) site, but I’m beginning to see a major flaw in their search methods: half the pages that came up were from WeatherMatrix.net, an organization that I haven’t done anything with for years, since AccuWeather.com bought them out. The only thing I’ve done there recently is delete my account, an action which takes 18 weeks to happen. But come on Cuil, is that all you can come up with? What’s so wrong with jimmy.bouma-holtrop.com? Not close enough to my search term for you?
Anyway. From there I decided to see how I ranked on the more major search engines.
1. Google, which apparently has 62% of the USA search market, has this site ranked 12th, after my WeatherMartix.net member profile at #1 (should be gone within 18 weeks) and other assorted sites, such as huntingtondma.com, which I manage. Not the best result, but I guess better than not being there at all. I should also note that bouma-holtrop.com comes up third on Google.
2. Yahoo, the second in USA search market share, has this blog (well, bouma-holtrop.com/jimmy, which is the same as jimmy.bouma-holtrop.com) at #2, just after bouma-holtrop.com. Go Yahoo. One wonders if it has anything to do with the fact that this site is hosted by Yahoo? One hopes not, for the sake of fairness.
3. MSN Search, the third and last “major” search service in the US, has “Jimmy’s Bio”, a page that I removed from bouma-holtrop.com a week or so ago, as the top result. My old page for Digital Media (bouma-holtrop.com/jimmy/dma) is next, and third is jimmy.bouma-holtrop.com, but not indexed as the new blog yet. Me thinks MSN needs to update their cache for bouma-holtrop.com and all its sub-domains.
One interesting thing is that all four search services (Cuil, Google, Yahoo and MSN Search) all bring up huntingtondma.com in their top 10 or 20 results, an association I’m not at all averse to as I’m the primary “hands-on” webmaster of that site.
Tomorrow I should try to figure out some of these search engines search methods and see if I can do some things to enhance my rankings. Mostly I need to figure out what the f I need to do to get this site on Cuil, since my rankings are pretty good on the other services.
For now it’s bedtime as it’s 6am.
-jimmy
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