New Russian/Multiligual Directory?

Anyone heard of this?

[Brad]

I hope I'm not breaking any rules here for posting this URL.

I have no affiliation with this outfit at all.

Has anyone heard of them? Any traffic? They look real new for some reason. Russian?
[mavicanet.org...]

[Bradley]

Hmmm... an imposter on my name... Ha ha just kidding Brad. I think you are fine with your post.

I searched these forums for "mavicanet" and nothing was found... (I did submit my site to them (using an alternate email address)

Brett has a great board here - very informative posts - You'll be glad you found this place.... I'm a daily reader here.

See ya 'round I'm sure ;).

[rencke]

It appears you have made quite a find here, Brad. Mavica is indeed Russian - owned by a Moscow-based telecom outfit and designed by a Russian design company. It is a man-made directory with volunteer editors fashioned after ODP. If you add up the number of listings for the categories, you end up with 544.647. After elimination of cross referencing that ends in a net figure of 191.602 according to their main page. That is less than 10% of ODP, but still quite impressive.

Strange is that our Russian members haven't mentioned it. We have had numerous contributions to the discussion on Russian search engines and directories number 1 [webmasterworld.com] and number 2 [webmasterworld.com] but no one has brought up Mavica. That raises a big question about their traffic volume. Their language support is quite impressive. I checked out one of the more exotice languages - my own - and found the translations to be immaculate, quite a surprise. I also found that the descriptions had been taken from site descriptions in meta, suggesting that they may have created at least part of Mavica by spidering.

They appear to be stand-alone, at least Google hasn't spidered the same phrases that they have on their main page anywhere else. What I haven't checked is if any of the leading Russian search engines might use Mavica as their directory. Perhaps one of our Russian members can help us out here.

When this discussion has run its course, I will have it spliced onto the end of Russia #2.

[Brad]

It looks like they have started their launch in the West. I checked two directories of search engines and found that they were listed in one in March of 2001.

After reading the excellent threads listing Russian SE's here it seems that the big difference is that this directory aspires to be global as opposed to simply national.

Perhaps this will serve as a market gateway to Russian markets? I know they have an uphill battle but I have to admire the effort.

[Eric_Jarvis]

Russia has had some pretty web savvy people for many years...I've been waiting for something like this...I'll be interested to see how it pans out in terms of dealing with both European and Asian markets...that's where I see Russia having a huge advantage

[Nblond]

Hoh, now it has 23 languages, and more than 250,000 links. Who know, how many editors in this directory?
PS: I suppose, if this growth rate is stable, it will be a good European directory.

[Brad]

Nblond -

I like this directory a lot. I have several sites listed and get a little traffic from them. The editors appear to be very hard working as I have always been reviewed promptly.

IMO our Russian friends are producing a quality directory.