Two of my favorite restaurant chains have fallen victim to the economy and possibly disconnected marketing. Bennigan’s and Steak & Ale have filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and stores owned by its parent company will shut their doors.

The news appeared to be a shock to most of the company’s employees, but some may have had an inkling that the company was not doing well. Steve, a Bennigan’s waiter in Plano Texas, said he recently went from making $30 on a good lunch shift to only $10. Business has been slow, said Steve, who said he relies on tips. I went from making a lot of money on a shift to making very little.

I’ve shared many a laugh and a meal within the walls of these two restaurants and I’m sad to see them go. I fear this is just the beginning for the restaurant industry unless a major marketing mind shift takes place.

At first glance the closing of these two casual dining mainstays seems to be indicative of the economy. Sure the economy has something to do with it but I’m not 100% convinced all the blame lies on the economic downturn.

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To my dismay, I received an email today from my one of my bosses at work with the subject that read:

The new Google is Cuil.

At that moment, although I couldn’t remember why, a dark cloud began to come over me. Not because I am an avid Google worshipper. Not because I feared that Google might be dethroned. No not for that, but for some other unknown reason. I knew I came acrosse that name before “Cuil”, but I just couldn’t remember where. So I continued to read the email and followed the link to this article Ex-Googlers Debut Cuil, A(nother) Anti-Google.

I read the article, instinctively skipping over the first paragraph. Yes, I am weird like that. But more often than not the first paragraph just provides references to some other posts. I wanted to get straight to the meat and potatoes. Kind of like skipping the introduction in a book.

Anyway, I must say I was impressed to learn that this new search engine just launched with over 120 billion pages in its index. Cuil claims to the largest and fastest search engine in the world. But being a Webmaster and developer of hundreds of sites and several web servers, I asked myself, How in the world did a massive search engine launch without me knowing about it?

Then A new Outlook email notification popped up:

“More on Cuil – Do a search for Internet marketing consultants. If this is going to take off, we will need to understand where they are grabbing the logos from. The BlueClaws logo isn’t going to cut it for us.” 

So I searched for Internet Marketing Consultants. Yeah, when I copied it from Outlook it selected the period as well. And what do you know, “We didn’t find any results for ‘Internet marketing Consultants’”. I was immediately apparent that Cuil has a long way to go before they can claim they are bigger, faster and better than Google. And it wasn’t just me, many bloggers and news article reported that Cuil fails to return results for a variety of search terms.

So then I removed the period and what do you know – My company Single Throw Internet Marketing is right there on the first page. Just as it is in Google. Just as we should be.

But Cuil’s search result for my company showed our clients logo instead of our own. How did they manage to mistake Minor League Baseball’s Lakewood BlueClaws logo for ours. A quick blog search revealed several blogs reporting Cuil was in hot water for algorithmic flaws. Hey, it could have been worse. As one blogger points out, his blog has nothing to do with cigarettes. I am also pretty sure that Google is going to love Cuil’s thumbnail of Eric Schmidt.

Eventually, I made my way back to the original article I was emailed. I read that first paragraph I initially skipped. When I got to the part that says, Cuil (“cool”), a light bulb went of in my head. After quick search I found a post I made last year on samaBlog and remembered where I knew their name from. When I made that post, I didn’t know who they where. Their spider, the Twiceler Bot, had began crawling a new web site I was working on and mauled my server. It would not go away and every time I tried to block the bot, the chameleon put on a new face to avoid detection.

A warning to webmasters:

Cuil’s Twiceler bot maliciously indexes content. It does not respect well accepted standards like Google’s Webmaster Guidelines or even the Robots.txt protocol. It blatantly ignores http status codes like “404 page not found” and “403 Access is denied”. Their bot has the potential to crash your server and wipe out your databases. The more you try to fight it off, the harder it tries to index your content.

Cuil’s black background suits them well. Let’s just say that Google is a white hat search engine and Cuil is a black hat. A very black hat. Let me go out on a limb here and say I would bet money that a vast portion 120 Billion page index is html error pages and duplicate content.

What do you think of Cuil? Pass or Fail? Let us know.

Not only does Cuil fail to return relevant search results, Cuil’s Index is way out of date. In many cases they return no results at all. I don’t care if your index has 5 trillion pages or 500,000 pages as long as you return relevant results for what I am seaching for.

In my opinion, Cuil fails to live up to their marketing hype. Furthermore, they are going to have alot of explaining to do. The already have a bad reputation with webmasters who know who they really are. They are going to have issues gaining trust among the community, so if they want to be the next Google, that’s where they need to start. Especially as more developers and webmasters like myself start coming out of the woodwork to reveal how they got their massive index.

Cuil – SHAME ON YOU!!!

This week, AOL breached users’ rights of privacy by releasing data on over 650,000 user search habits during the past 6 months. Sure, this type of data is culled by the search properties all the time. Yet never has this data been posted publicly in one of the biggest blunders recorded by traditional media moguls like the New York Times and has set the blog world to wear down their keyboards.

AOL was attempting to provide search data from random users for the “research community”. The data comes from searches done within the AOL client from March through May of this year. They felt that the users were protected as they were “anonymized,” as AOL puts it, by replacing their screen name with a number.

While you can still get the data online, we felt that it makes no sense at this point to further perpetuate this blunder by linking here. Unfortunately, AOL’s attempts at anonymity were pedestrian at best. The data not only provides search phrase, but also the search request time, dates and the site they landed on as a result.

While it’s the kind of marketing information we drool for, it certainly is not the way to obtain it. And unfortunately, since the users are totally unsuspecting that their privacy is about to be violated, searches using credit card numbers, social security numbers and other sensitive data is also included.

In a story released by the Times on August 9th, we meet AOL user No. 4417749, known to her friends as Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, GA. The article clearly shows the ability to track a person’s identity simply by a little CSI work on their search habits.

What was AOL thinking??? And what will Google say, especially since holding their grounds against the DOJ??? We’ll wait and see…

Once again, Single Throw’s Caryl Felicetta looks at search marketing and search results giving her own spin of a “perfect world” in SERPs.

Felicetta notes how many results simply do not provide what searchers need.

How many of you are frustrated when you are trying to find a new vendor, or a new product, and you instead are fooled by spammy link farms, or simply sites that do not really suit your needs?

Organic search results – those that are indexed by the search engine spider, then run through a series of formulas, or algorithms – are generated by content found on a site, as well as Title and META tags. By including the content searchers are looking for, you are serving on of the formulas requirements: relevancy.

Relevancy is the key to generating qualified leads, bringing you that much closer to the sale. It is the connection made between you and the searcher. If that connection is not made, or broken, you will likely lose the sale.

Understanding the basics of relevancy and customer need combined with tailoring our sites and messages can help to improve the quality of search results – and business! I know it’s not like saving the Earth, or global warming, but it’s a start to making information, communication, and maybe even the economy, better.

Read more here.

Remember black and white TV’s? How about UHF and VHF dials? No HBO, ShowTime or Sopranos in their showing us the “reality” of a North Jersey mob family, complete with cursing and nudity? Why are soap operas called “soap operas”?

It was a time when TV existed because of commercials. TV shows were brought to you by “XYZ Company.” Variety shows did live ad commercials for products. Soap operas were named that because they were sponsored by the soap manufacturers…actually taking us back to a day before TV existed and radio was king.

Commercial TV shows are certainly are still, of course, “sponsored by,” but who actually even hears those words out load anymore? They generally become the signal to get up and hit the fridge. And cable TV has certainly made those 60-second breaks disappear from our memory.

Marketing evolves. Radio evolved to TV. TV further evolved to commercial free broadcasts, VOD and DVRs. Radio continues to evolve with satellite offerings. Then there’s the Internet. It no wonder that at this week’s Association of National Advertisers TV Ad Forum conference it was released that 78% of advertisers said they have less confidence today in the effectiveness of TV advertising than they did two years ago, according to AdWeek. It was also noted that some 80% will spend more of their advertising budgets on Web advertising and 68% are looking into search engine marketing.

The reality is that everything changes. Consumers have far more options than they did in the past. That option extends to marketing. They can now take an active role to gather only what they want or feel they need. They can see a message online, hear it on the radio, then jump online to get more. It is our role to ensure that we give them every opportunity to find us and information about our products and services easily and effectively.

As Darwin said, it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

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