A wealth of search

There appears to be momentum gaining for newer types of search engines - engines that pay people for how much their words have been looked at and/or used as a reference by other folks. The more the attention you get, the more you get paid. Topsy (www.topsy.com), a search engine, that is focused on redefining search by not only looking at how many times your pages are linked but also who is linking it and how it is linked, may be trying to usher in an Internet version of getting paid for the influence one commands among a community. While the scale of such search engines may not match the generic engines such as Google or the redesign MSN engine Bing, there exists a reasonable business case for such engines to coexist with or within large search engines. The question is how far will this paradigm be extended? Will we see a day where search results are returned based on precisely how the author of the content wants it to be shown - to the most relevant community and to the persons commanding the higher influences within it?

Cuil - the next best thing in search engine technology?

Cuil, a company floated by former Google search executives and financed by the venerable venture firm Greylock Ventures, promises a lot. But will it catch on? The search engine is capable of searching triple the number of web pages than Google can, according to its founders. Cuil, an old Irish word for knowledge, seems like a formidable competitor. But will it be, really? The way we assess a search engine's functionality is based on areas such as:

1: reasonable aggregation/presentation of information
2: presentation of relevant and updated information
3: employ a targeted advertising model for revenue generation
4: ability to link to specific information within web pages and buried documents

How many of us ever cross page #2 of Google, MSN or Yahoo! search results? Do we really need so many result pages?

So when Cuil claims that it can search more using less hardware, we are not sure how the results will be more relevant or how a very relevant result missed out by Google may magically show up in Cuil's search engine. Or for that matter, we are not clear how Cuil will go one up against Google in all 4 of the parameters presented above. It appears to us that the goal of maximizing advertising revenues may conflict with the goal of serving up pertinent results. For the goal of pertinent results, the effective use of resources would be to screen all irrelevant pages and present only pages that are most relevant. But this would mean that advertising real estate on several million pages would be rendered valueless. Our question to Cuil is: is anybody of relevance complaining today that they dont appear in search results?