Ex-Google employees have started their own search engine called http://www.cuil.com which is pronounced “cool”. Two ex Google engineers and an Ex IBM employee have started their own search engine which is touted to have indexed more then 121 Billion websites. It appears to be more than anyone else including Google, although Google stopped counting publicly at 8 billion.

So you may ask why would anyone take notice of yet another search engine that is framed out to be the next Google killer?  Well the reason is Google has taken notice. Before Cuil even officially launched Google posted to the Google Blog or Google webmaster blog about the size of the internet, the amount of indexed pages it had and that Google has indexed 1 trillion links.

Needless to say it is very unlike Google to take notice of anything, so this could possibly mean that a few ex-google employees with 33 Million could burst Google bubble.  Who knows.

With the latest Google Toolbar Page Rank Update, I have been discussing this with several clients. It came to my attention that most people do not realize that at anytime you can get a real time snapshot of your websites current Page Rank according to Google.  Within Google webmaster tools, you can view what your current Google Page rank is in a way.  They do not offer you a specific number, but they do break it down into 4 catergories. High, Medium, Low and not yet assigned. It displays this in the form of a bar chart, offering an clear picture of how your websites current pages are valued based upon Google’s Page Rank.

To view this for your website, all you need to do is click on statistics and then crawl stats to view this information.

Assumptions can be made that your home page is probably the highest ranking page, so if you see a really small bar in the high or medium section this is most likely your home page.

At first you may look at this and feel somewhat perplexed by what does low, medium and high really mean. Based upon my experience, I can help with this:

Not Yet Assigned- would be a grey bar or no Google Page Rank.

Low- this puts your Page Rank Between PR0-PR3

Medium- this puts your Google Page Rank Between PR4-PR6

High- this puts your Google Page Rank between PR7-PR10

I was amazed at how many webmasters and website owners did not know that they can get a pretty clear picture of their current Google Page Rank and how to view this realtime.

I hope now, everyone does not feel that they need to sit around and wait for Google to do a Toolbar export to see their current website Page Rank. It is always available to you.

What would be cool, is if Google would just really show you the actual PR number of all your pages right in Google Webmaster tools, maybe some day.

Hope this helps.