Just tried out new search engine Cuil to see what all the fuss is about – the query string I entered: Photographic Wedding Invitations.

Here’s what Cuil comes up with:

And here’s Google’s offering:

So, not quite what you’d expect from Cuil, given their self-proclaimed status as “the world’s biggest search engine” then.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

So claims the blurb on the Cuil website, but their 121,617,892,992 indexed web pages don’t include any results for a search query Google returns 3,770,000 for (with one of my sites ranked No. 1 – at least when searching from my computer within Ireland ).

Incidentally, Cuil also draws a blank for the search term Wedding Invitations Ireland, and putting in just Wedding Invitations takes and age before the SERPs are returned. Makes you wonder whether they’ve launched before they’re really ready.

Is Cuil a Google killer. Current evidence would suggest not!

So, for now at least, I’ll be sticking with the big G. And, thankfully for our wedding invitation business, I think so will the majority of the web-searching public.

An article in today’s Sunday Times outlines how spending on SEO in the UK is on the increase as businesses vie for potentially lucrative organic search listings in Google.

According to the article SEO spending in Britain will reach £400 million this year, and the figure is growing 60% year on year.

The article also highlights another, less welcome trend: basically that newspapers really don’t get Search Marketing!

When it comes to describing SEO I found it simplistic. Keeping things simple for the sake of clarity is of course a good thing… but in this case the article manages to be simplistic and confusing.

For example, Author James Ashton describes SEO as:

Part crystal-ball watching, part trial and error, it is the practice of improving lacklustre internet commerce by getting a firm noticed on the results pages of search engines.

Hmm! Not sure that’s really it.

Summarising how companies go about SEO he adds:

Most companies achieve SEO by peppering their websites with keywords that Google’s technology can easily read.

While comparing SEO and PPC he ventures:

Of the two, SEO was invented first, with the concept of paying for positions in search results introduced only a decade ago by Goto.com, now part of Yahoo.

Strictly speaking the article isn’t inaccurate, and it has some interesting facts and figures in it, but overall I found it a tad misleading.

Perhaps my biggest problem with it though is the unwritten implication that SEO is about gaming  the engines — when of course (at least for legitimate businesses looking for long term rankings), that’s really not what it’s about at all.

Think I’ll stick with this SEO theory.

Apparently today (01 April 2008) is the official "day without Google" day.

How did I find this out. Uhm… well, I saw the ReadWriteWeb article in a Google search results page. Oops, too late!

The concept is being championed by Alternative Search Engines — which lists the 100 top alternatives to the incumbent search behemoth. Sorry guys, while it’s a novel idea, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

It got me thinking how much many of us have come to rely on Google. I use GMail for non-business e-mail and IM, Google Analytics to track statistics for my websites, Google Reader to keep track of my RSS feeds, Google Docs to collaborate on documents, Google Alerts to flag things worth reading, Google Maps to find places in the real world, and of course Google Search to find everything else.

In fact, the thought of NOT having Google is quite a scary one… and that, in itself, is a scary thought! I guess like so many people today I’ve become pretty much institutionalised at this stage. Why? Because Google makes my life easier in so many little ways, and that’s very compelling. It makes it hard to leave behind… and the better they get at it, the harder it becomes.

Is there really a viable alternative out there that can rival the services and quality of search results Google offer at the same competitive (FREE) price? Even matching Google won’t be enough — because to entice users away from the Big G, to make it worthwhile, any competition is going to have to offer something substantially better. And from where I’m sitting right now they’re all a long way from doing that.

As for a Google free day… well, maybe next year….