Is Cuil really that cool?

The short answer:

I don't know.

The longer answer:

Something I always wondered about Jimmy Wales' Wikia project was how the search engine was going to establish an index of billions of web pages. Even assuming the legitimacy of user-driven search, which is itself a stretch, the technology and capital required to overpower Google in search would likely evade the overmatched Wikia.

Cuil, on the other hand, promises the ability to index the internet's hundreds of billions of web pages better than Google. Not only do they intend to index better than Google--and even claim they already have an index three times as large as the search giant--but they intend to do it with far less financial resources.

Apparently, my major argument against Wikia doesn't seem to apply to Cuil. What does make me skeptical of the new search engine is the actual product that was lauched today. If Cuil is crawling roughly 125 billion web pages, why are there some fairly substantial pages absent from search results? One decent example that demonstrates my point (and possibly my partiality) is the absense of City Dictionary from the search results. Google has already crawled and indexed the website a number of times since it went live in April. (Google currently lists nearly 10,000 pages for City Dictionary's domain in its search results.) Google has also followed several links from other websites to City Dictionary, each time placing greater importance on the new website. As a result, City Dictionary has the #2 spot in Google for 'City Dictionary' and the #1 spot for "City Dictionary" with the quotation marks.

Q: Where does City Dictionary appear in Cuil's search results?

A: Nowhere.

Even when I put in 'City Dictionary local flavor,' which makes an obvious reference to the tagline 'The Dictionary with Local Flavor' that appears in the 'title' tag for the homepage, the results suddenly go from somewhat relevant to completely off the radar. (Top search results include pages from lawyer.com, as well as others looking to sell "cheep airline ticket.") Bottom line, I can't find any of City Dictionary's thousands of pages in Cuil.

Why is this important? I don't have any delusions of grandeur for a site that is only a few months old (it's still not so bad if I do say so), but City Dicitonary's complete exclusion points to a very daunting problem for Cuil. If the new search engine already claims to have a larger index, that index still does not seem to have very timely content. City Dictionary has been in three different newspapers in the past few weeks. Google finds timely content because it is constantly crawling the most popular news sources. Since a great part of search is based on time-sensitive issues, I can't help but to question the quality of a search engine that can't follow links from newspaper websites in a timely fashion.

So, does Cuil really have an indexing advantage over Google? Well, not necessarily. Google no longer publishes the size of its index, so Cuil's claims to be three times larger than Google are suspect at best. Plus, very little is known of Cuil's indexing techniques; so, the young engine's ability to (re-)crawl billions of web pages on par with the incumbent search giant is questionable.

It's not just content; it's intent. Search is still an intent-based medium. Reducing the influence of links to search engine results o take away the ultimate popularity metric on the internet. Are web pages that have backlinks from several blogs and trusted news sources of higher quality than web pages without such links? Generally speaking, yes. Of course Google will continue to sort search results by content relevancy, but the democratic system of linking is still paramount until Cuil can come up with something more compelling (which may exist but has not yet been articulated). Cuil must have an answer for the very powerful Page Rank system. Otherwise its 125 billion collection of web pages is for naught. (By 'naught' I mean being sold to Microsoft for about $500 million.)

Will Cuil end up creating great search results from its gargantuan index? We'll have to see what happens in the years to come, but for now it's not that cool.

New Facebook Profile?

I just received an odd e-mail from the Facebook Ad Team, outlining some of the changes that will be made to Facebook profiles and ad units. I will not comment on those changes until I can see some of the results firsthand from my own ad campaigns. Similarly, I cannot comment on even an initial reaction to the aesthetics of such changes until I can even see a demo of these changes. Tech Crunch just reported on the FriedFeedization of Facebook. In this post the blog claims you can see a demo of your new Facebook profile at new.facebook.com, but this subdomain simply redirects me to the regular Facebook homepage.

This frustrates me for three reasons:

1) Tech Crunch put up a link whose target was not what I expected it do be. I expect more from the popular tech blog.
2) Facebook often launches new services in an uneven fashion, offering them to certain people and not to others. This leads to confusion when asking friends "did you see that new thing on Facebook."
3) Most importantly, I'm upset that I can't see the changes when I'd like to write a blog post about the new ad setup.

I'll be heading to the Canadian wilderness for the rest of the week, but will hopefully have something substantial to report next week on the new Facebook changes. (All I know now is that ads will be served up on the righthand side and will come in twos, instead of a single ad unit.)

UPDATE: I can now see the new Facebook design from that same link, new.facebook.com. I will still comment on it at a later date because I still don't have any real results to share from an advertiser's perspective. This will come next week.

Making Sense of the Numbers

Google, IBM, and Microsoft beat revenue projections. These are good signs that the biggest tech companies are not experiencing a slowdown in their businesses.

However, there's one minor detail: Microsoft and Google both missed on earnings. Investors in after-hours trading have duly punished these stocks. But are the losses entirely warranted? I think the Google and Microsoft misses need some further analysis, but investors should rest assured that the two companies both beat revenue projections in a very tough economic environment.

Take Google's position, for example. Google is eating up market share and is getting closer and closer to a natural monopoly. Also, ad dollars are continually shifting from traditional media to the online space, whether on the desktop or a mobile device. Once overall ad spending picks back up, Google stands to reap all of the benefits. (Google's mediocre performance may have graver implications for Yahoo! than it does for Google itself.)

Besides, Google has typically performed poorly in Q2, which would point more to poor analyst estimates than it would a real trend in Google's long-term trajectory.

Anyway, the online ad market isn't going away. In fact, it will see huge expansion globally in the next 12-18 months when the global economy turns around. (History shows that business cycles are indeed cyclical, and there's no reason to believe that the economy won't turn around in the next year or so.) Google is still the best play in this space. You still need Google in your portfolio. It might not be for the faint of heart, but then again: what business do the faint of heart have trading such a volatile stock anyway? Don't trade it. Buy it, hold onto it, and watch it go up in the next couple years.

Huge Day for Yacrosoft

It can be hard to get work done when Google and Microsoft report earnings after the bell. The country is looking to both of these companies to give a pulse reading on our troubled economy. Will Microsoft mirror the positive results from Intel, which point to a strong PC market? Will Google show immunity from economic downturn, or will it signal a slowdown in the online ad market?

As for Microsoft, I am encouraged by Intel's indication of a robust market, but the 21% growth expectation for this quarter seems a little too lofty for comfort. Even though Microsoft seems to be trading cheaply lately, I wouldn't recommend buying before the earnings announcement.

Google, in my estimation, has a better chance of meeting--if not exceeding--expectations. According to Mark Mahaney of Citigroup:

"Companies spent more money on search advertising in the second quarter than in the first, and they continued to plow the lion's share of their ad dollars into Google."

If this is true, Google should expect to improve on last quarter's $4.84 per share, barring an undue increase in spending. More importantly, Google should greatly exceed the more conservative $4.74 per share that analysts are currently expecting.

Bottom line: You should have some of your portfolio in Google for the long haul, and perhaps increase your position before the closing bell if you have the guts.

The Politics of Information

I promised myself that I wouldn't get political on this blog, and I intend to keep that promise. However, I will steer you toward this article on Bloomberg that talks about the two candidates' stances on current issues that will have a huge impact on how people use the web. Give it some thought and feel free to leave comments.