Google Now Showing Customized Results Message

This is great news, Google just announced that they will be showing a message to searchers stating that their result has been customized based on Geo region or on personal usage data. Clap Clap.

Cool or is it Cuill or is it Kuil?

I must say i got a kick out of this today, the new Google killer search engine Cuil.com launched with great fan fare yesterday. Jury is still out but long way to go to be a threat to anyone. Pretty unanimous, reports I have read indicate poor relevancy and not only from those in the search industry, seems to be the general consensus of average users as well.

No question that the Cuil marketing campaign was a fantastic success. In fact they got hit with some much traffic, their site came down a few times. However, Cuil pronounced 'COOL', huh? Seems a stretch and potentially confusing to consumers doesn't it? Well, this morning's Google Trends seems to bear that out pretty well. The amount of misspellings is pretty surprising really. The one I liked the best is Cool.com and Cool.

You would think a start up with $30 million in financing and with a crazy spelling pronounced 'Cool' would have considered buying or leasing Cool.com, which is a parked domain.

And the list goes on; quil, cool search engine, kuil, guil, coil, cuill, and I supposed this says it all; cuil sucks.

Spamming Google Trends

Google Trends, July 13, 2008, 7pm GMT:

Special People

Too good to pass up:

Google SERP Clicks and Attention Distribution

This pretty much says it all:
From a 2006 Cornell eye tracking study. This is a good summary of the study itself.

XML Sitemaps Might Not be Great

Finally someone has addressed this. All the crazy drum beat in the SEO community over the last year to create site maps was loud. It became almost a mantra. Of course the fervor really originated from Google, heck if they say it, it must be good right? I haven't been able to pin down the true benefit to Google. But it seems to me that there is no clear benefit to a site owner if your site is crawlable and indexed well.

SmallBusinessSEM address the topic and gives some vague anecdotal evidence that when he implimnented a site map his site took a hit, when he took the map down everything came back.

Facebook Tops Myspace in May

According to comScore, Facebook passed up Myspace in May for number of unique visitors, 123.9 million to 114.6 million. Most of the growth for Facebook has occurred overseas where Myspace has appeared to stagnate a bit.