I refer, of course, to reader or user reviews, the kind you find on Amazon, Buy. They're everywhere. But it's the fraudulent reviews--positive reviews contributed by "readers" paid by the company being evaluated--that worry critics and advocates alike.
In an October poll conducted by the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, savvy Web consumers dubbed "e-fluentials" by some wordsmith who evidently was unfamiliar with the term " effluent" were clearly convinced that fake reviews are endemic--and could result in a backlash from online consumers.
All are signs of a healthy skepticism. Beau Brendler, Director of Consumer Reports' WebWatch site, says that the bottom line is: "[Fake reviews] happen all the time--but proving it, quantifying it--is very hard. Did they use it properly? Did they follow the manufacturer's directions? There's no way to know," she points out.
Many ordinary people consider reviews written by consumers to be more reliable, more critical, and ultimately, more useful than many other sources of information. At least that's what they told The Nielsen Company in a survey conducted in April In a story that PC World posted in , we generally agreed with the above perceptions--but we're a bit more cynical now.
Certainly, reader reviews have come a long way since the era of Usenet and reader forums.
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Depending on the site and its readers, you may find pithy commentary, long-winded rants, numeric ratings, pros and cons, graphs, and even reviewer videos. But Mitch Meyerson, author of the book Guerilla Marketing on the Internet, thinks that "influenced" reviews paid for or not are pretty common. For example, says Meyerson, "authors often enlist friends, colleagues, and clients to review their books on Amazon.
According to Blogging Tips founder and Web developer Kevin Muldoon, "tech sites usually have fair, accurate [reader] reviews Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. She believes her latest invention is even more valuable - only this time it's not for sale. Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.
The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool. Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier - searched for better ways to search. Web index: For starters, Cuil's search index spans billion Web pages. Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.
Ex-Googlers: Where are they now? Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest. After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way.
The posting didn't quantify the size of Google's index.
Alerts In Effect
A search index's scope is important because information, pictures and content can't be found unless they're stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results. Content analysis: Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links.
Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.
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Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs. Other contenders: The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma whose technology became the backbone of Ask.
MSFT, Fortune this month. Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra about its rivals.
Digital Marketing Advice for Agencies
But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won't be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20, employees. Patterson joined Google in after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google. Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson's husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late s.
He later joined IBM Corp. Costello's Irish heritage inspired Cuil's odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore. Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. Jensen Comment on July 28, Thus far the hype seems to be more hyped than the performance on this first day of trials. Google gave me hundreds of hits and many of them were quite relevant to my research. Cuil gave me four hits and most of them were irrelevant to my research.
Cuil said it had 1,,, hits, but I could only find a way to list four of these hits. Another limitation is that Google has many cached documents where the original link is no longer active. Cuil does not mention a caching service. First turn your speakers on and read in "Excel Magic Trick 73" in Cuil. Next read in ""Excel Magic Trick 73" in Google. Google's cached version takes you to an interesting video on the significant-digits bound in Excel.
If that's the case, Cuil will be a bummer. It does have Preferences button, but thus far that seems to be inactive. EDU ].
I do a great deal of google searching almost everyday and so this is of great interest. To run a quick test, I went to cuil. I then tried "auditing simulation" and got pretty much the same thing. I also noticed that it was looking for "audit" and "simulation" separately and that there was no option for an advanced search, which on google allows you to combine words into phrases and sentences. I then tried "audit simulation" again, but this time with the quotes. This improved the results slightly, but most of the hits were still not very relevant. The links did have more information attached to them, but the information seemed to take up too much space.
This makes more sense to me and when this link does not come up in cuil. Thanks again, for the tip,. We've been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn't appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant. It seems pretty clear that Google's index of web pages is significantly larger than Cuil's unless we're randomly choosing the wrong queries. Based on the queries above, Google is averaging nearly 10x the number of results of Cuil.
And Cuil's ranking isn't as good as Google's based on the pure results returned from both queries. Where Cuil excels is with the related categories, which return results that are extremely relevant. With Google, we've all gotten used to trying a slightly different search to get the refined results we need.
Of Wolves and Wilderness
Cuil does a good job of guessing what we'll want next and presents that in the top right widget. That means Cuil saves time for more research based queries. And I want to reemphasize that Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.