Google now allows us to reorder and annotate search results. If you log into google account, you can see 3 buttons next to each search result, including: Promote, Remove and Comment. But, any changes you made will ONLY be saved into your Google account and won’t affect others, at least for now.
Google obviously understand the beauty and power of human-editing community (e.g. Wikipedia, DMOZ), and they now encourage their massive user base to contribute to the search engine. Although Google haven’t directly linked their search algorithm with this new feature yet, they might do that in the future if they are able to collect solid and substentcial evidence to show human-editing leads to better search quality.
Microsoft today launched SearchPerks, which gives users points when they use msn live search, and then the points can be redeemed for all sorts of rewards.
The new CashBack programme encourages people to use Live Search, and they believe it will work in terms of increasing market share of online search.
To participate the SearchPerks, you have to download a special browser add-on, and you must use Internet Explorer. So, Microsoft is trying to kill three birds with one stone:
- To get more Live Search users
- To get more IE users
- To have a better understanding of what people are searching for
Cuil is so brave that they labeled themselves as Google-killer. 
I like it and I think their launch was very successful in terms of broadcasting their messages, which have been posting onto many media giants, including PC World, TechCrunch, Time, Yahoo!, CNET, Mashable etc.
Unfortunately, cuil went offline just few hours after the over-heated launch. But, that is always a good problem to have. (I hope we could have that problem when bizroof was launched. 
)
I have to be honest that scalability and relevance are the 2 main problems for cuil at the moment. However, they have successfully created a BIG index, which I believe is the hardest part for searching engines.
Some suggestions
It is not an easy job at all to startup brand new search engines and compete with Google, Yahoo and MSN, even with $33M funding.
So…… maybe one of the followings could help……
- Open Source - Get some help from all the developers on the planet. (Firefox is a good example in the web browsers industry)
- Human Editing - Go a little bit further and keep in mind that you guys have got a fabulous indexing system. Wikipedia and DMOZ are successful, aren’t they?
Good luck, Cuil, and we will give you a hand if you need.
