The new search engine is run by former Google employees, and has already provided its first traffic to this very blog, see the domain entry in my stats which showed up earlier today:

New referrer entry from cuil.com

Along with a bigger index (they claim 120 billion pages) against Googles roughly 40 billion indexed pages, there are several other advantages to the new search engine. The results are not displayed in the classical Google fashion, but rather in several columns along with bigger text snippets than Google provides.

A search for my name shows up like so:

Cuil.com search for Lars Koudal

Another feature is the seemlingly semi-intelligent search engine, which attempts to group your search results and sort them into categories.

It is gonna be very interesting to see how Cuil.com is gonna do in competition with Google, especially from a SEO perspective. If they can generate enough traffic by ranking highly, the ballgame might change completely, so you need to optimize your sites for not only Google anymore, but Cuil.com as well.

Personally, I don’t know how well they are gonna do, the search results display very slowly, but it might be worth it for the better and nicer layout, and it might also just be an initial traffic spike.

Read the full press release.

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Google under competetion? Meet Cuil.com

I read a recent post over at No Doubt Marketing, where they mention their top three tools. One of them is the Google Website Optimizer, which I have heard about before, and apparently signed up for once, since one of my old sites were listed under my experiments, but have not used in years.

The tool that Google provides free of charge is simple, but very powerful. It enables you to test which design and sales text that works the best.

You start out by defining your start page, and then the page a customer will see once they have completed a purchase. In between, Google Website Optimizer enables you to try out different headlines, images, sales text, whatever you choose, and then it tracks your success rate. It might be with a few simple changes your product sells a lot better, without you having to do anything more than a few tests and then let Google Website Optimizer do all the testing and analyzing for you.

I will be doing a lot of testing on an upcoming project that I am currently working on.

A small spoiler: Automatic deep link building with a Wordpress plugin. There will be both a free version and a subscription version that enables more features. Contact me if you want to know more before I launch the system to beta.

You can see the flash demo of Google Website Optimizer if you want to learn more about the system and how it can help you increase sales.

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A little known tool - Google Website Optimizer

Ready to take that big leap into the world of Photoshop? It may seem really intimidating at first, which is why we’ve put together the School of Photoshop Tutorial series. With the help of these structured lessons, you’ll be a master of Photoshop in no time!

Their school is split up into lessons from Kindergarten through to 8th Grade (at the time of writing this post).

Their lessons are easy to follow, well written and well illustrated. I hate tutorials where they are simply posting a range of images, or where there are no imagery and only text. Tutorial9 does away with this and writes with care and interest for their visitors.

Give them a visit, I’m sure there are gems of wisdom to find for everyone: Tutorial9.net

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Tutorial9.net launches “School of Photoshop” series