Mirago expands into Europe

[Shak]

The new indexes are now live in Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden, adding to those previously launched in the UK, Germany, France and Spain.

[netimperative.com...]

[mirago.com...]

Shak

[Rumbas]

Thanks Shak,

What's the deal with these guys? How do you get into their SE? I couldn't find ANYTHING on their danish site. Sorry, but that's not very enlightening?

[Shak]

Rumbas

I am sure the very nice peops at Mirago will be reading this, and their very own James Bond will be along shortly with a very detailed post on how its done.

1 thing I like about Mirago, they just keep going, suppose thats from having entrepeneurs at the controls rather than accountants.

ah, and they know how to throw a damn good party :)

that sale must be close ...

Shak

[Mirago_02]

Hi all,

Thanks for bringing this up Shak - as you know we're not ones to blow our own trumpets ;)

In response to Rumbas's coment, these are still very young indexes; the content and coverage is being improved all the time. We will be putting up site submission pages on these indexes soon so that you can all point out those sites we have missed so far.

Our current content is based upon URLs we have gathered with our existing robots in other countries, DMOZ, and the largest proportion from our own recent crawling activity. I won't give exact figures as these change all the time, however our current page totals for the various new countries are:

www.mirago.it - 20 million
www.mirago.dk - 15 million
www.mirago.se - 10 million
no.mirago.com - 10 million
www.mirago.nl - 15 million
www.mirago.be - 10 million
www.mirago.ch - 15 million

As ever, if you have any suggestions our ears are very widely open.

Nick

[Rumbas]

Hi Nick - welcome to WebmasterWorld and the Euro Forum in particular.
Thanks for the info regarding your engine.

gathered with our existing robots in other countries

Sounds interesting, so you have added the URL's in Danish that you've found in say Germany? How about your crawl frequency? What about the bot - do you have a UA, IP or something we can identify the little fella with?

DMOZ

Good place to start - specially in Scnadinavia where Dmoz is quite large in terms of sites listed there. There are a few other important directories here as well that might be good to start spidering from.

Site submisison pages

Great. How long do you expect the turn around time will be from submission to actually showing up in the serps?

Thanks for stopping by Nick, I hope you'll stick around the Euro Forum :)

[claus]

Welcome to Scandinavia (DK, SE, NO) :)

Nice SERPS, initially, although i can see that you still need a few pages here and here. Not a bad start, though.

Politely speaking, your Danish translation is not very good though (as i've just told you on the feedback form). After doing so, i nearly fell off my chair and made a literal ROFL when i saw the message:

Tak nemlig jeres besked
Tak for lån nemlig indtagelse den gang hen til henvende sig til os! Der nyde blevet mange eksempler under den sidste år hvor lempelser og forbedringer hen til den arbejdsplads nyde blevet direkte kørt af brugernes såsom dig selv gør antydninger via indeværende skema.

I'm not going to translate that to English. Although it doesn't make any sense whatsoever, it's very funny reading. Did you just put the original page through babelfish or what?

Here's the proper wording for you, even polite and friendly, as i guess the above should be:

Tak for din besked

Tak fordi du tog dig tid til at henvende dig til os! Gennem de seneste år har vi gennemført mange gode justeringer og forbedringer efter forslag fra brugere som dig.

:)

[edited by: claus at 12:55 pm (utc) on Dec. 7, 2004]

[Mirago_02]

Hello again,

The UserAgent is "HenryTheMiragoRobot" for all of these new Countries. We do include a URL along with this UA so that webmasters can learn more about the robot. This extra info doesn't affect your robots.txt files - we look for "HenryTheMiragoRobot" in those.

We certainly do keep a record of all the URLs which are not appropriate for one robot, and pass them around to those which might find them more useful.

Our crawl and build routine is currently running on a four week rotation. This is true across all of our indexes. This should mean that any newly identified site (through whatever means) will appear in the results within 30 days.

Hope that helps you all,

Nick

[Rumbas]

Thanks Nick.
4 weeks, not bad.
I'll look for the bot in some of the sites I monitor and see if Henry is stopping by.

Tak nemlig jeres besked
Tak for lån nemlig indtagelse den gang hen til henvende sig til os! Der nyde blevet mange eksempler under den sidste år hvor lempelser og forbedringer hen til den arbejdsplads nyde blevet direkte kørt af brugernes såsom dig selv gør antydninger via indeværende skema.

Claus, that is hollarious! ..and a good thing you made a nice paragraph for them :)

[Mirago_02]

Hi Claus,

Ahem..... Thanks for pointing this out - I even say that without gritted teeth ;) Our web guys are making changes to this, and hopefully you will all be able to make more sense of this page shortly.

I'm glad to hear that you are pleased with our initial SERPs. As I have said, we are adding more content daily and we rebuild these indexes regularly. Areas where we are a little light on results for these new indexes shouldn't take us too long to cover - especially with all the feedback you have been providing. This level of positive feedback is incredibly useful and is really appreciated from all at Mirago.

Thanks again,
Nick

[claus]

oh, perhaps i should translate the suggestion above to English:

-----------------------------------
Thank you for your message

Thank you for taking the time to contact us! During recent years we have made many good adjustments and improvements following suggestions from users like you.
-----------------------------------

(in Danish it doesn't really sound as formal as the above, especially not "during recent years". The latter "you" is actually "yourself"-ish, so it doesn't sound as formal - also, "good" is "nice"-ish, and "thank you" is somewhat "thanks"-ish for some people (and "thank You" for others), but you can't really translate subtle stuff like that verbatim)

[Shak]

I spent 10 years in Denmark as a child, so maybe this is my big break working for an SE doing translations.

;)

Shak