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While the majority of the SEO community has prematurely dismissed Cuil as a non-event, now is the time to be honing and developing your Cuil optimization skills and resources. It takes a search engine 2-3 years to mature. Microsoft launched its Live Search engine on September 11, 2006 and Live has already become the second-most visited search destination after Google.

Microsoft doesn’t have to unseat Google in terms of either visitors or queries in order to be taken seriously as a search engine. And with Yahoo! wobbling on the brink of financial meltdown, there is a very real chance that the search industry may be shaken up within the next year. While such an event would produce opportunity for Ask and Snap, it could also benefit Cuil.

So before you hang up your Cuil bookmarks in disgust, keep in mind that they are engineering new search processes that are no doubt being evaluated by the major search engines. You may just find it necessary to figure out how Cuil does things in case someone else decides to mimic Cuil’s (pretty cool) interface.

Here is what I have noticed so far:

1. Cuil likes images
2. Cuil likes text
3. Cuil likes to cluster closely related content

Although Cuil’s representatives have stated they don’t rely on links to determine rankings as much as other search engines do, several people have noted link-oriented properties in the Cuil search results. The one aspect about link analysis that Cuil cannot escape from is the need to follow links for discovery.

And if Cuil can discover an image-less document from a document with embedded images, I’ve found more than one example where the linking page’s images may be associated with the destination page’s images. Cuil appears to be using proximity to links (or perhaps content zoning, including images in the content zones) to determine whether there may be relevance between a linking document’s image and the destination document.

Now, this is not always the case, so clearly Cuil could be utilizing more than one factor to select an image for the destination page. In a sample search for my own name, I have found many relevant results on Cuil’s front page. In fact, if we assume for the sake of discussion that I should be the only Michael Martinez on the front page, Cuil returns more relevant results than Google, Yahoo!, and Live. But some of the images make no sense.

Since Cuil first launched the images associated with my name search results have changed (as have the listings). But some of the images include a dagger (probably page-dressing from a fantasy site, perhaps from a page on the site from which Cuil took an article about me); the SF-Fandom logo (which is placed next to the listing for SEO Theory); a screen capture (next to a now-deleted Wikipedia discussion about my incorrectly created user profile page); and a picture of a crowd of people I don’t recognize.

A search for SEO Theory returns mostly relevant results, but it includes pictures beside some of the listings, including an image from Cartoon Barry’s blog and a scan of a magazine cover (that has nothing to do with me). A picture I have used on several sites is positioned beside a blog that linked to SEO Theory.

The results from these two queries alone are too chaotic to support any reverse engineering hypotheses, but it seems apparent to me that if you want to influence your Cuil listings you should:

1. Include appropriate images within the same content zone as your text
2. Emphasize your keywords in your text, rather than depend on link anchor text
3. Include appropriate images within the same content zone as your outbound links

Where we can go with this
Text-image couplets are not used very much in today’s Web design, but there are certainly opportunities for using them. In fact, if people developed microformats that include both text and images, Cuil (and other search engines) would have an easier time of identifying text-image couplets and keeping them together.

These iBlock microformats could be used for inventory descriptions on eCommerce sites, profile sidebars on blogs and other social media sites, snippet sidebars and floaters embedded in articles on all sorts of sites, and other small text-image combinations.

To implement a microformat, you create a class in your style code (a style sheet that contains all your microformat classes for your Web site would make implementation of new microformats fairly simple). Microformats offer an opportunity to extend the information you associate with a particular image.