Did you have a look at your server logs these last few days ? Ever worried about a stranger twiceler robot ? Well Cuil (Irish for knowledge) is the answer, a new search engine that aims to challenge google ! Press release : MENLO PARK, Calif.—July 28, 2008—Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.

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Creating urls with Search engine optimized keywords from database records involves more than just mod_rewrite and htaccess synchronization. The first step of a good search engine indexing strategy is to take one of your database fields as index (title is a good one) , transform it by removing spaces, special characters, and if necessary append record unique identifier to the generated string. Here is a sample function that transforms a string to make it file compliant using a regular expression to discard non alphanumeric characters and replace spaces with dashes :

function make_url($string){

$pattern = “([^[[:alnum:]|[:space:]|[:blank:]])+”;
$anchor = ereg_replace($pattern, ”, strtolower($string));
$pattern = “([[:space:]]|[[:blank:]])+”;
$anchor = ereg_replace($pattern, ‘-’, $anchor);
return short_name($anchor); // return the short filtered name
} # end function