Beyond dot.com

The regional search engines & directories

[austtr]

Hats off to the groups involved in putting together the profiles of the search engines and directories that appear in this and the other regional threads. I am sure it will flush out new opportunities for a lot of webmasters, especially those with interests in those countries/regions.

Working with english language sites, my focus has always been on the usual major .com SE's and directories, but about 12-15 months ago I sat down with Search Engine Colossus and reviewed everything in it... top to bottom. I wanted to see if I was missing out on anything.

After eliminating those that only accepted domains from their own country, own language, country specific topic, or some other form of country based criteria.... all that remained was a very small assortment of what seemed pretty obscure search engines.

Conclusion at that time.... a good learning exercise but it was not going to translate into additional traffic for an english language site. The country specific versions of the majors (AV Sweden, Excite Italy etc)provided access to the english language sites (I think) and they would be the means whereby english language sites reached those audiences.

Is that a fair summation or has the scenario changed in more recent times?

[rencke]

Yes and no. The problem is that only 28% of all Europeans understand English at all. (32% of the surfers). So a site in English has limited reach and it is not clear exactly which market segments you can reach and where. A site aimed at a younger audience (<30) can probably do well everywhere except in southern Europe, but that's about as much as I dare to predict.

If you really want to reach Europeans in a big way, then there are no shortcuts and the early conclusions about how to do that can be found here:
[webmasterworld.com...]