Cuil - An Over Hyped Money Pit
Cuil, what was dubbed to be the search engine that finally takes down Google. Everything sounded great; a team of ex-Google employees, $33,000,000 in venture capital, no IP addresses recorded and even a funny name.
Cuil went live on the 28th of July 2008, it has a really rocky start. The pages loaded slow, but this was because they had over 50 million searches which is more than Microsoft’s Live Search gets.
I tried out a few searches. I came up first for my own name, which is a good sign, but some of their results are somewhat lacking. I found a few spam results, bad ebooks and just keyword pages designed to trap spiders. Now, they claim to have the most indexed pages out of any search engine in the world. However, this is probably because of the immense number of spam and bad quality pages, which Google doesn’t have.
Cuil doesn’t have an image search, but this may be because they have combined image and web search. If you search in Cuil you will be greeted with both normal results alongside normal results. The results page is tabular, with results not going straight down like Google but across and down. So in Cuil you get a page of results that go vertically and horizontally, but in these results are also images and small thumbnails.
The idea of image and web search combined it good, but sometimes on a slow connection you don’t want to see images and sometimes you will only want to see images.
So, Cuil have spent $33 million on a search engine. It is ok, but needs some changes made to make it anywhere near a threat to Google.
Getting Started With Google AdSense
Google AdSense is a service that allows the owners of websites to publish adverts and get paid for each click that they get. Advertisers can buy advertising through Google’s AdWords program.
Once you have signed up and been approved by AdSense, you should have a look through the programme policies to make sure that you do not get removed from the programme.
Now you need to start getting adverts put up on your website(s) so that you can start generating revenue and clicks. So, log into your AdSense account and click the “AdSense Setup” tab at the top.
This should bring you to the setup page where you can choose what type of adverts that you want to display. Unless you want something else, then by standard you should want to use the “AdSense for Content” type of adverts. So, click on “AdSense for Content” and you should be bought to the next page.
You should select “Ad unit” and “Text and image ads (default)”. When you click Continue you will be allowed to choose the size and colour scheme for the ad. Take a look at Google’s Ad Formats page and choose what size of advert that you would like to display. Select that size and format in the drop-down box.
You should now be onto the colours part of the setup. You should select the colours so that your ads blend in well with your site, look like part of your site and don’t stand out too much. This is called blending, you can follow Rob Malon’s great & advanced guide on blending adsense ads, found here. However, you can just choose colours that look good together as advanced blending is not essential.
Once you have chosen your colours, I advise that you save them, so click “Save as new palette” and you will be able to use those colours later without having to choose them again.
Now just select the corner style that you want (I always use square) and choose what you want to do if for some reason ads aren’t available (I use public-service ads).
Click continue and you would be bought to the channels page. I advise that you create a channel and give it a name you will remember. When you display adsense on different sites, all your ads will be displayed together. If you use channels, you can put your ad blocks in different channels and see exactly what sites and ad blocks generate what revenue.
Click continue, give your ad block a name (just something relevant) and then click “Submit and get code”. When you get the code, paste it into your website’s HTML. When you visit your website the first time, the ads will not show. It can take 10 or so minutes for the ads to start showing on your site.
After a few days when you visit the AdSense reports section, you should see your channels and you will be able to see how much revenue they have generated. Remember to read the programme policies.