Euroseek bankrupt

Potentiel investor pulls out

[Rumbas]

Dagens Industri in Sweden reports that Euroseek.com has gone bankrupt. The company says that the potentiel investor has pulled out due to the things happening i the US rigth now.

"We had bridge financing arranged with an international company, but they pulled out following the terrorist attacks. They thought that the market situation was too unstable," says Euroseek president and main owner Bengt T. Hellsten.

"There is no doubt that the terrorist attacks were a factor causing the bank to come back to us to say it was not possible," Kjell Almskog said at a press conference.

"Attempts to save the pioneering Euroseek internet portal have been unsuccessful. The company, which has debts of SEK 42 million, froze its payments two weeks ago and has been seeking fresh capital . On Tuesday, the company filed for bankruptcy at Solna District Court."

Sadening that a pure European search engine has to close down :(

Article from DI [di.se]
Euroseek [euroseek.com]

[heini]

> pulled out following the terrorist attacks. They thought that the market situation was too unstable

Thatīs pretty alarming, if itīs really the reason. But I seem to remember there were rumours of problems before with Euroseek. Anyhow, with bad news from Infoseek plus bad news from Euroseek itīs not the best day for european search engines.

[Rumbas]

I too remember some mentioning of Euroseek being in trouble earlier this year. Something about some wealthy brothers and their stake in Euroseek. Couldn't find it though.

>itīs not the best day for european search engines

It's a black day euro search engines for sure.

It made me wonder if a European search engine really is a smart thing? We've discussed the issues concerning translation a site into more languages and promoting it to the local engines in each country. Consensus was made that each country/language represents a seperate marketing effort both in terms of copy, design and cultural "feel".
Now, does that not contradict a Pan European Search Engine? I mean Danes mostly go to danish SE's, Germans to german SE's etc.

Stats [kalle.netcheck.se] from April 2001 show approx. 19 mio visits this month, which is ok.

What's the feeling, could an SE cover all European languages?

[heini]

Rumbas, thatīs a very interesting point.
I never knew why there should be something like a European searchengine. General searchengines are organised along the lines of countries and languages. There is no such thing as a european language.
So itīs quite clear that every engine relates first to itīs home country and then to English as Lingua Franca.

What's the feeling, could an SE cover all European languages?

Sure, Google could do it, Fast could do it... only both operate worldwide. There is just no logical reason for an SE to do all european languages but sparing out the rest of the world.

[oLeon]

I agree, heini- the difference between the us and the europaen market is the language: why has FAST its showcase-engine in english? īcause only a few nordic people understand norwegian...
So a SE which covers the europaen market is not far away from the worldwide market, and I wonder why euroseek didnīt match to the whole world. This has been the cardinalmistake.

[rencke]

Euroseek has been in a sea of financial troubles for a year, so this was expected. They never really invested in the hardware necessary to provide good search results. The last time we discussed Euroseek here, I think they had barely 100 million pages indexed - a very small part of all European pages.

As to a an SE covering all European languages: Couldn't it be said that both Google and Fast do this right now?

[Rumbas]

>Couldn't it be said that both Google and Fast do this right now?

I would agree to some extent. They both cover a lot of languages and have excellent SERPs in these languages as well.

However, my initial though was a SE that would be able to "mix" the languages more. Say I wanted information on "bio enzymes research". The SE should be able to rekocknize cross cultural/language information and present it to me in english or even my own language. At first glance I wouldn't care if the content was from Germany or France as the SE would be able to translate it.

Would future SE's be able to understand fx. "money", "geld", "penge" etc. and find the most relevant pages, present them with an option to translate the page into your language?

It would take a hudge ammount of ressources to compute the SERPS, which Euroseek didn't have. Google and FAST have the technology and power to "digest" a lot of info.

Well, maybe Heini said it; "There is no such thing as a european language"

I guess it all (again) comes down to translation?

[engine]

Actually, it is a shame that this engine had not succeeded. It's been around for such a long time, too.

I wonder how many people, other than those of SEO people here, knew about Euroseek. Not so many, I would suggest, and this may also have contributed to the demise.

[henki]

Yes they have been in Limbo for a long time. Allready in May they could not pay out salleries to their employees. They sold some stocks in other ventures and announced that it was enough to keep them floating till September.

They did a lot of things wrong. When they started, they required that webmasters to create a log in with them in order to submit pages.
They received some 20 million dollars back in -99. Instead of making a great product, they centered on advertising. They where buying heafty TV and print ads, despite the fact that the SE it itself sucked. They even bought traffic from MSN (being their default engine) at a price of 50 cent PPC.
Like many other SEs they decided in -99 to become a portal instead of developing the algorithm.
IMHO they asked for to much when they wanted to be in every market in Europe. They had no focus on, or understanding of their product.

I am not particularly sad to see them go, as it never was a good SE. I do think it is really sad that they use the terror bombings as a scape goat for their bad economy and bad business strategy.

[Mark_A]

Have been away from webmasterworld for a short while - just starting to submit some sites that I have been building and lo and behold, euroseek, which I thought had only just come alive again .. is dead again .. at least its own directory is.

It seems now to be ODP index and google search results.
Shame to see another low cost entry point going.

[Macguru]

I wont resolve for me. Google shows it was crawled 2 days ago. No news on Google, neither than fast. Is it just downtime?

[Nick_W]

I've heard nothing good or positive about Euroseek ever. It was quite exciting when they relaunched earlier in the year but this was followed by a similar set of blunders to the first time.

It was only a matter of time before it flopped again. Shame, somebody should get a euro portal working...

Nick