The traditional August break in Italy is a wonderful time to work on projects which linger on the back burner during the rest of the year. Last August led to the release of a free keyword selection guide (in Italian); this year’s focus is a Course on using the AdWords PPC paid search marketing program.

While capturing some updated screen shots for the PPC Course, I came across an interesting example of a search marketing phenomena known as PPC or AdSense arbitrage.

Search for Milan – Rome Flights

Consider this search for Milan – Rome Flights:
Figure 1: Search in Google for Flights between Milan and Rome

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A new search engine, Cuil, has launched, in an attempt to become the next Google. Cuil was founded by people with experience from Google, AltaVista and IBM – sufficient enough to get the mass media’s attention in the dog days of summer.

Rather unfortunately Cuil decided to tout it’s index size as a primary feature. As seasoned search engine professionals know, there are many other issues which also impact quality search results. Are the indexed web documents fresh, up to date? Google is indexing some sites in just minutes:

On it’s home page, Cuil says “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages”. This number hasn’t changed in days; it seems that their index is more static than Google’s.

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