A .eu only search engine - is there a market?

Is it worth building a .eu only search engine?

[jmccormac]

I've been working on analysing the results of a survey of 1.77M .eu domains in June. These resolved to approximately 1.436M websites. It turns out that approximately 20% of the websites have actively developed content. It would be possible to build a search engine to cover these sites. But the important question is this: is there a market for a .eu search engine given that .eu ccTLD is such a disaster zone?

Regards...jmcc

[vincevincevince]

No market at all. EU-relevant information appears on a wide range of TLDs, and I suspect much more of it is not under .eu than is. If you really want a .eu search, just append site:.eu to a Google search string and use that.

[jmccormac]

No market at all.

That's what I was worried about. :)

EU-relevant information appears on a wide range of TLDs, and I suspect much more of it is not under .eu than is.

Yes but this is actually a heavily filtered index of active .eu websites as opposed to framed and stealth redirects.

If you really want a .eu search, just append site:.eu to a Google search string and use that.

Again this index is better than Google's. The problem is that the survey turned up only 287K or so active websites out of 1.436M. More .eu websites are holding pages, PPC pages and brand redirects than acutal natural webdevelopment. With only 16% natural webdevelopment activity, .eu is quite a disaster zone - perhaps I could get an EU grant to develop a search engine - after all, if they gave a ccTLD to those muppets in EURid, this is bound to be worth a few Euro. :) But then nobody in Europe seems to be interested in .eu - my own stats tend to prove that. Still I have an old Pentium 133 box that should be up to the task.

Regards...jmcc

[vincevincevince]

The important questions are:

Do sites within the .eu TLD offer a distinctly useful set of data above-and-beyond that which would be obtained through a specialised index which is not based on a TLD?

Why would someone use the .eu search engine?

The .eu TLD isn't strictly a ccTLD, as there are many ccTLDs within the EU region. Surely, a .eu search engine should include all of those as well, i.e. all active sites under .eu, .co.uk, fr, .ie, .de, .be, etc.