The internet is a big place, so making sure your online advertising dollars effectively reach your target market is one of the biggest challenges for managers.

When it comes to most marketing activities, whether it be a newspaper advertisement, television commercial or internet campaign, managers are always striving to choose marketing mediums that attract the most number of potential customers for their dollar.

This is where search engine marketing has a huge benefit over its more traditional rivals. SEM can obviously be targeted to the exact keywords you want, which gives you a great level of control over who your advertisements reach. By targeting the phrase “neon lighting brisbane” you can be fairly well assured that your ads are going to be displayed to those who want to buy neon lights in Brisbane.

However, not everyone includes the location when searching, meaning that someone from Perth can search “neon lighting” and click on your ad, costing you money without ever really having any intention of purchasing from you.

One way to get around this dilemma is to use what’s called ‘location targeting.’ Location targeting in programs such as Google AdWords allows your business to specify to what geographic regions you want your ad displayed.

For instance, you might want to target the whole of Australia, so you select that option. Alternatively, you can narrow down your region even further to a particular state or city.

An even better option however, is to use an ad radius, which allows you to set a certain size ring in which you want your ad displayed. For instance, you might set up your campaign so that your ads are displayed within a 50km radius of the Brisbane CBD, and only users within that radius will see your ad.

Obviously this is an extremely useful tool as it enables businesses to really target their potential local customers. One word of warning though, this is not foolproof system, as current ISP setups in Australia mean some users will not see your ads when they should.

The search engine, called cuil (pronounced “cool”) is an old Irish word for knowledge and is the brainchild of a former Google employee, Anna Patterson.

There are some in the industry who claim that cuil could threaten Google but others are very sceptical.

The engine works on the premise that it returns results based on content relevancy to the search criteria. They claim that this results in better search results for the user. They also claim to have indexed more pages than any other search engine on the net, over 120 billion.

Here’s the problems for Cuil as I see them. For one, the fact that they have gone down the content relevancy path is dangerous because it means that for certain three or four word search phrases, such as “neon lighting brisbane”, sites could theoretically keyword spam and get high listings.

Despite Cuil’s line that they weight content relevancy more heavily, in many cases I found that the sites that were ranking well on a search phrase only mentioned that phrase once on their page and weren’t even on that topic.

For a quick comparison, lets use a Google vs Cuil search for ‘neon lighting brisbane.’

In Google:

Of the top ten results (and let’s face it, that’s all that matters), 6 of the 10 were actually sites selling neon lights in Brisbane, one was a wikipedia article on Brisbane Tourism, two were informational sites on neon lights and one was my old article where I used ‘neon lighting brisbane’ as an example just like now.

In Cuil:

Unfortunately, the results were hopeless. There was one result for a blue light disco (not in Brisbane), a broadway musical in Brisbane, a chrysler site, a blog (who mentioned lighting in passing), a mini jukebox, a site selling computer hardware, a film studio, an electrical transformer store, and two news sites.

The Verdict:

Obviously this is just one example, but try your own searches and you’ll see that quite consistently Cuil generates fairly obscure results with little reference to the search topic.

Now I’m not trying to be too harsh on them, it would be very difficult to spring up overnight and upstage Google but they have a long way to go before they’re even playing in the same league.

Location targeting is a must, as is fixing the logo-like images that appear beside results that are either poorly cropped, pixelated or simply of no relevance to the site they are beside.

But users would probably put up with some of these drawbacks (at least for a while) if Cuil generated more relevant results than Google. However, they don’t really get close.

Don’t write them off just yet, the layout and design is quite nice, but underneath it all you just feel like there isn’t the guts that Google has.