Here’s something new on the Search front: cuil.com, a brand-new search engine developed by former Google Engineers.

According to CNN Money, former Google employee Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so effective, Google bought it in 2004 to upgrade its own system. Now Patterson and her husband have launched cuil (pronounced “cool”), which aims to compete with the search juggernaut.

Google has dominated internet search so completely for so long it’s hard to imagine anyone challenging their monopoly. But many of us would love to see Search distributed more evenly amongst a number of companies. For that reason alone, any effort to challenge Google is worth cheering—

Any genuine competition is likely to improve existing Search performance (and Google, good as it is, is far from perfect). Perhaps more importantly, having one company dominate Search (as Google does) breeds a volatile and easily-abused (and abusive) system in which a businesses’ Google rankings can literally mean success or failure.

Best of luck, Cuil!

ps: please rank SierraDescents.com highly!!

Those of you who publish small websites know we live or die at Google’s whim, so it’s always news when Google releases new information regarding publisher best-practices.

The problem in the past has always been Google’s ambiguity. Google doesn’t want to give so-called Black Hat publishers information they can use to trick Google and game the system. But that same ambiguity makes it much harder for those who play by the rules to stay in compliance. After all, if you don’t know what the rules are, it’s awfully hard to obey them.

Google Anti-Spam Guru Matt Cutts talks about the new documentation on his blog: Improved SEO Documentation Galore! The info is thankfully quite explicit (at least for Google), and offers numerous useful tips for publishers. If you’re got a website, it’s must-read stuff. Even if you’re not a web publisher, if you’ve even been curious as to some of the workings behind the curtain at the massive Google machine, I think you’ll find it interesting.