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.

Increasing numbers of people are using more sophisticated search terms to find what they’re looking for online.

This is hardly going to be news to the SEO experts among you — but for those (like me) getting to grips with SEO for the first time, it’s a pretty important concept to grasp.

The 7 most used word phrase lengths for Web search engines averaged over a the two month period to the end of January 2004. (figures from OneStat.com)

Understanding how people are using search engines to find what they’re looking for lies at the very heart of your SEO/SEM efforts. Choosing the right keywords / phrases is critical both in terms of optimising (or optimizing, for Americans out there) your site for organic SEO, and choosing the phrases worth bidding on for your paid search / pay per click campaigns.

Web users are demanding more from search. They don’t want to trawl through spurious pages of results, and are getting much more sophisticated in the search terms they use in order to narrow those results down. Search engines are also getting better at handling these multi-word phrases, and are delivering back exactly what the user is looking for.

Search engines, and perhaps more importantly search users, are coming of age… typing more natural, and longer phrases into the search box is a natural extension of that.