Today on Monday, July 28, 2008 a new search engine called Cuil was launched.

Its address is:

http://www.Cuil.com/

Cuil claim that they search more pages on the Web than anyone else, even more than Google and Live. They say they search three times more than Google and ten times more than Microsoft (Live).

The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.

I went to Cuil to search for some keywords. It was hard to reach Cuil. Initially I just couldn’t get to the server.

It said:
We’ll be back soon…
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
Thanks for your patience.

Finally when I got, I was surprised to see Cuil finding zero results for many popular keywords. Even for a keyword like “Home Loan”, Cuil returned zero results.

Though I managed to find a keyword for which Cuil returned some results. The results are shown in a different format than many search engines display.

The results are splattered in a 3 column on the screen. We have an option to make it to 2 column. When I made it 2 column, the space in the right (3rd column) was left blank. I guess in the future Cuil will only allow 2 columns as it will fill the 3rd column with paid ads.

I can’t comment on the quality of the results as it’s the web surfers who will decide how good the new search engine is.

Cuil will not rely on inbound links like Google to rank websites, but will study the content and overall relevance of WebPages to find their relevance to a search query.

The reason for this is they don’t believe in analyzing the users of the web, but the web itself.

Since user habits are not important to Cuil, they don’t collect data of what you search online.

Cuil is owned by Anna Patterson and her husband Tom Costello. Anna Patterson was working at Google in the starting years. She worked there for two years. She was responsible to build some of the formulas Google uses for its search engine ranking.

If you find any information about this new search engine Cuil, please leave a comment.

Website testing is important as it helps you to get more return out of your investments. But just don’t jump into testing. There are some questions that are needed to be answered before you start your test.

To test means trying to know/discover something so that a marketing decision can be taken. There is a means to an end. Remember that both have to be right else things may go wrong.

There are some pointers before you start testing that I am trying to address in this article.

Many people want to test, but just don’t know how to plan. This article will help them a bit.

What you want from the test? What is your Goal?

The first thing that should be in your mind should be what you want to achieve with the test. Most website owners want to improve ROI. But reasons may vary. For example you would like to generate more leads or may want to decrease bounce rate or increase average time on site per visitor. You should know what you want to achieve from the test.

Why do you want to achieve this?

There has to be a reason to what you want to achieve from the test. For example if you want to decrease bounce rate then you should know why you want to do this. Is there any other factor that is more important than actually decreasing the bounce rate? It may be that increasing leads may help your business in the long run more than decreasing bounce rate.

What you want to test?

Its important to know what element of your site you want to test. For example you may want to test your headline or you may want to test the price or both.

Knowing what you want to test will help. Here is an article on what elements you may try to test.

Will this test stand good in long run?

Always think of long run. Short run outcomes may be good for the short run, but may prove ineffective in the long run. Since testing takes time and money, why should you think of short run?

By long run I mean a test that may give you results that will stand right for the next 6-7 months to a year. After this timeframe you may need to test again.

Plan your Budget

Testing is costly. You must put some money aside if you are thinking of testing your site.

Doing a research, consulting professionals, getting your creatives done, and using a testing software will cost you money.

Of course there is a free software for testing – Google Website Optimizer. Its absolutely free and I recommend using it.

http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

Decide a time-frame to test

Your test has to begin and end within a specified time limit. If you are season seller you may want to finish the test before your selling season starts. What’s the point in testing when the results come after your selling season is over. You may have to wait for another year, and by that time a lot may change. Your test results may not be valid by then.

You may also want to test when the traffic flow is the highest / lowest. There are some business owners who fear testing may disturb their ongoing business, so they test when the traffic flow is the lowest to their site.

On the other side, some want to test when the volume of traffic is the highest to know the best possible result.

Whatever time you choose to test, its important that you get a statistically significant result. I will discuss it later.

Any technical issues?

Some elements may create a lot of software related problems, or may have website design related issues.

These problems occur mainly with dynamic websites. That is websites that generate pages on-the-fly. Before test begins ensure that there aren’t any technical glitches and the test runs smoothly.

If any of your creatives is creating a problem, you may want to change that creative.

Statically Significant Result

When the test is over, you should get statically significant result, else you may take wrong decisions. A statistically significant result is something that is unlikely to have occurred by chance.

For more on the meaning of statically significant please click here.

I am sure if you keep this in mind you will plan better your website testing.

Google AdWords decides the price you pay per click on many factors one of which is the quality of your ad. This decision is made on looking into the ads CTR – click through rate.

The search engines consider an ad of higher quality if its getting higher click through compared to other ads in the same category.

So its important that you test your ad to get the best click through possible. Remember, higher click through means more visitors for less.

Lets discuss how to test your ads.

On a piece of paper write top 5 benefits of your business. When you are writing benefits think from the customers perspective. Think why they should buy from you than from your competitors.

It may take some time to arrive at 5 real benefits to your customer. Take your time but get the right benefits.

Google allows a maximum of 25 characters in the Ad Title or Headline. You can describe about your product in a maximum of 70 characters i.e. a maximum of 35 characters in line 1 and a maximum of 35 characters in line 2. You cannot spilt a word in the two lines.

Write your first ad. Your best benefit should be in your Title. Its just 25 characters so make sure your benefit fits in that space.

Write the rest of your benefits in the 70 characters space you have. Again, try to write your benefits in the description.

Similarly make another ad. This time push your second best benefit in the Title, and the rest in the description.

In your third ad, put your third best benefit in the title. I hope you understand. This way you can create 5 different ads to test.

Now its time to run the ads. Run the ads for a significant amount of time (at least a month) and till each ad gets at least 100 clicks. Make sure that both the criteria are met.

Why am I asking you to do this? Because when you test something you must get a limited number of responses before you can take a decision. Technically this is known as statistically significant response, else based on the results of test you may take a wrong decision.

After all the ads have got the minimum number of clicks, pause two ads with the lowest CTRs.

Write two more ads. This time with inputs from the first three ads according to CTR. You may also want to include any benefits that were left out due to space constraints. Write them in your new ads.

Repeat the test. Run the test till a statistically significant result is achieved. Again pause two ads with the lowest CTRs and write two new ads.

This way you can keep on testing till you have tested all benefits and you get the ad that works best for your landing page.

Like this you can test ads for all your landing pages.

While you test, you will learn a lot of things that you didn’t knew previously. And some results may surprise you.

Believe me testing is fun and a great learning experience. So go ahead and test your ads.

Its good news folks!

Google has changed the way it showed the results in its Keyword Tool. Instead of showing the Approx Search Volume in form of a graphical representation that looked like a green bar, it is now showing approximate number of search queries generated in the previous month on Google and the search network.

Even the Approx Average Search Volume is now showing approximate number of monthly search queries that were performed over a recent 12-month period.

Lets look at the benefit of this:

1. Eliminate Guess Work: Before search marketers guessed looking at the green bar. If it was full it meant a lot of searches, but there was no way to know how much. Now they know exactly how many searches are made and approximately how many clicks they can expect to receive every month. (Please note that Google tool offers this too, but my experience says its far more than what we actually receive. Its best to compare your results with Google’s and come to a conclusion.)

2. Plan Budget: Search marketers can now plan their budget for pay per click campaigns. Now that they can calculate approximately the number of clicks they can expect to receive, they can allocate budget for each campaign.

3. Create New Campaigns: Since numbers can be arranged, you can now arrange keywords in increasing or decreasing order of the number of searches made and make new Campaigns in your AdWords account. These campaigns can contain different AdGroups having keywords depending on the number of searches.

4. Competitors Lose: There are many online keyword tool providing companies who sell the approx number of searches made on Google and other search engines. Now that this number will come for free, we don’t have any need to buy such a service.

5. Numbers say more than Graph: I am sure there are many who left a few keywords looking at the small green bar thinking it might give them very less traffic. Now that they get numbers, they may rethink.

These are some benefits of Google keyword tool offering approx average search numbers instead of a graph. If you feel I have left out a few points, please do mention.