Search is hard
This week Cuil launched. We pay attention to everyone in the search space even though we really don’t consider most companies competitors. Lijit builds search based applications that install on publishers sites. We selected that mission very carefully because publishers are first and foremost our customer. We don’t operate a destination search site but rather empower the sites we reside on and the publishers we serve. Lijit has all the parts of a search company, we have lots of computers crawling and indexing the web and our secret sauce is the way we bring a level of trust to results and an alternate methodology to ranking pages.
In the world of destination search, Google pretty much owns the show. It’s not impossible for that to change as witnessed by Google’s own rise. The latest contender in destination search is Cuil. I tried a few searches and had really good results. Others, not so much.
I had to chuckle at the Cuil results for a search for “Lijit”.
Cuil seems to lead with the Wikipedia definition of things (as do many other destination search engines – much to Google’s consternation). In our case the top result is the Wikipedia page Stan made about us a long time ago. (An aside: Now, I’m pretty sure we are the most knowledgeable people about “lijit” but Wikipedia outwardly dogs our entry as being a “conflict of interest” regarding this subject matter. It seems to me that requiring people less knowledgeable to be involved is a conflict of interest with regards to Wikipedia).
Anyway, where I was going here are the images. I kind of like the tabloid presentation of things but where did these images come from?
Apparently the best match images of “Lijit” is of a tire company logo, a boat of some type, a “buy now” button (our service is free), and my favorite a guy sniffing glue.
Search is hard..
August 10th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I got some wierd matches at Cuil too…& my pictures featured in many posts which were certainly not mine…I’m like…HUH??
I’ve just redone my accounts at Lijit coz I joined a year ago when I began blogging…am now off to take a refresher on what Lijit is all about. have a great day!!