New Search Engine Takes on Google

Former Googler's have launched a new search engine that they hope will rival Google one day.

The new site, called Cuil (pronounced 'cool'), has built up an index of 120 billion pages, which they claim are indexed in a more efficient way than Google.

According to Cuil founders the new search engine can understand the context of each page allowing the retrieval of better targeted search results.

Unlike conventional search engines Cuil displays search results in a magazine format. Unlike Google the new service will not harvest information about the search history of individuals.

Cuil founders, Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier are former Google staffers. The other founder Tom Patterson worked for IBM and others on search and storage technologies.

PageRank Update July 2008

Blogging Googler Matt Cutts has just written a post on his blog confirming that Google will be updating toolbar PageRank (PR) over the next few days.

For anyone who isn't aware of what PR is then it's Google's measure of how important a site is. They work this out from the number of relevant sites that link to the site in question and how important in terms of their own PR each other those linking-in sites are. More in my previous post about PR.

PR update time is always an exciting time for webmasters - it allows them to see if their link building strategies have been successful over the previous few months.

Matt also mentions that Google will be removing penalties from a few sites that have been naughty (e.g. violated their webmaster guidelines) in the past.

Good luck to all webmasters out there. Hope you get the PR you deserve!

WidgetBucks Conquers Europe

Great news for European WidgetBucks publishers - from this week they'll be eligible for CPC earnings from their European clicks. The new system has just started in the UK, but will expand to Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Belgium over the next fortnight.

Traffic from these countries will see local products priced in local currency, which should encourage more interest and clicks. That's great news considering that WidgetBucks CPC clicks are currently paying around 20 cents each. I've already seen some improvement in my earnings over the last couple of days.

WidgetBucks is also expanding its CPM country list, meaning that traffic from most parts of the globe will generate CPM earnings.

There are now more ways to earn good money with WidgetBucks so if you haven't tried it I suggest you have a go. You'll find more information on my WidgetBucks review, or alternatively you can sign up now.