ethnicomm – the blog part I

If you don’t know what Google Alerts are, read the post Use Google Alerts to keep tabs on your brand, your competitors and Pamela Anderson.

Although not as popular, Yahoo has its own version of Google Alerts called, surprisingly enough, Yahoo! Alerts. It does what Google does but seems to be more commercial with the alerts…branded news from AP for example. With the option to get things like horoscope alerts, snowfall alerts and personals alerts, Yahoo Alerts seems geared to the individual user not the entrepreneur, marketer or businessperson. However, you should get alerts from Yahoo as there may be content that might have been missed by Google (ok not bloody likely but you never know). Research shows that Yahoo skews more towards a younger demographic so if you’re interested in the under 25 crowd, you should definitely look into this.

Microsoft offers Windows Live Alerts (aka MSN alerts and .NET alerts). In addition to suffering from an identify crisis, they suffer from a usability crisis. I just checked and it now talks about pushing out info to subscribers like RSS. So why do you need this feature? This thing is just too much work to figure out and since I don’t think Microsoft is putting any energy towards it, I don’t think you or I should either.  Feel free to add a comment if you want to shed some light on Windows Live Alerts.

Back to Google Alerts

photo credit: masochismtango

If you are getting too much extraneous information in your Google Alerts, you can also exclude words from your Google Alert keyword search terms. So when you set up an alert for new “Pamela Anderson pictures” you can exclude those that have “Tommy Lee” in them.

I have a friend that is a high profile financial adviser who has to ensure that any instances of her name are reported back to the compliance officer  [some crazy Finra and SEC requirement that hasn't quite caught up to the 1990's let alone 2008. More on How to Market your Financial Planning Services and Stay Compliant later - click here if you can’t wait to see how hard it is}. She set up a Google Alert for her name but unfortunately, she shares her name with a member of the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, a Provost at a University, a tofu salad chef and a student at University of Toronto! I’m going to advise her to use the Advanced News Search to refine her criteria and then copy and paste the advanced search query into the Google Alerts search box.

Have you used alerts.com or favebot.com? Do you know of other alerts that are worthy of consideration?

A new search engine launched today and I was thrilled to read that it indexes over 120 billion pages or three times more than any other search engine according to their press release.  What other search engine is relevant?  The one where the Cuil guys came from – the one that should feel no threat – at least not yet. Cuil may be the biggest search engine but as you will see, biggest is not necessarily the best.

I was curious to see where I ranked on my keywords compared to Google. Not because it is important to me (well ok it is) but because the keywords I chose are part of my web strategy and if they’re not helping me rank higher and bring in traffic, they are useless.

So…I Cuil-ed the keywords (somehow I don’t think that it’s going to become a verb like Googling).  It was lightning fast in telling me the number of search results. Unfortunately, getting those search results to show up on my screen was slower than the new Facebook page refresh!  Out of 13 results on the first page, 4 were for one particular company. Cuil claims that they “focus on the content of the page and then present a set of results that has both depth and breadth.”  I don’t think so!

One key phrase, and I mean KEY phrase, yielded 14,500,000 pages on Google but only 114,518 on Cuil.  Even “web strategy” was poorly represented (98,756 results). In the time it took to roll my eyes, Google showed 31,600,000 results.

I also searched for ethnicomm to see if my homepage showed up. NOPE. In fact, a client’s homepage that had the words “web strategy by ethnicomm inc.” popped up several pages in. I would have tested it out some more before commenting but I didn’t want to wait 10 minutes for the content to spit out.  I’m sure things will improve over time but right now, I don’t have the time to waste on Cuil. And why does it look like cull on my computer?

On a positive note, the layout is aesthetically pleasing, I am not bothered by Adwords and the short descriptions seem a bit more informative. Maybe Google will learn from their ex-employees.

If you’re looking to switch to a better search engine, it is not Cuil!