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I wanted to download the new french version of netscape 7, and i've been really surprised of the complete new netscape site (www.netscape.fr).
One big search box and 3 buttons to search for french sites, worldwide sites and directory. No popup, no advertisement, just a pure search engine.
Guys from netscape did a great job, it is fast, simple and results are quit good.
Anyone have informations about this search?
Who powered netscape, if netscape will make changes worldwide?
thanks
A very clean look. They use Google's index with regional search as default. Very nice!
Merci beaucoup!
Results are the same than aol.fr but they made really interesting changes.
The 3 search buttons attached to the box, make the search more direct. Directly from the home page you can choose which search you want.
Compare to google, from their home, if you want to search the directory you have to clic first the directory tab and then do your search.
Their is more keywords to *Zoom* a search (don't know if zoom is a correct word in english, it's the one use by netscape) than aol. I really like this functionnality, espacially when I don't know which keyword use for a search. I start to search with general keywords related to the subjet and then the *zoom* give me the correct keywords to use.
In this case results are filtered.
I think that if you have a multi-language website, with pages in French it could be better to have a .com or .net or .org TLD.
A local TLD (for example a .it or .at etc) could be filtered in that case; in fact there are local TLD, but only if the site is a French directory (which directory? I don't know).
Try a search for Hotel Florence: there is a category like
Pays du monde > ... > Villes italiennes > Florence
Local TLD sites thar are in that directory appear in the searches.
Netscape.fr want to become the fastest search engine. And in fact, the respond time is excellent....On Netscape you will find the same results than aol.fr, but the zoom functionality is more important....With this new search, Netscape France will have users between google users and aol.fr users.
[edited by: heini at 3:34 pm (utc) on Nov. 21, 2002]
In my opinion exalead has good position in France but i'm not sure if netscape portal is so much used. Most common people stay on the portal of their provider (like free, tiscali, club-internet, aol) if they go elsewhere they go to yahoo or google or to specialized portals.
Anyway Exalead is a good challenger, and i was wondering if anybody knows if they have outside france projects?
Actually I'm quite impressed by the way the engine integrates spidered pages and directory results at AOL.
Their attempt at on the fly topic generation striked me as being the best on the market today.
AOL stayed true to this small local player despite the Google connection - and I think that was a good decision.
Firstly, I don't think most of internet user are aware that netscape and aol is the same company. I'm sure that only people who are in the internet business think immediatly of this.
Secondly, even if netscape portal is not very used (does someone has some figure about it?), they have an historical brand, and don't have to make any effort to *advertise* on their name.
In the news netscape guys said clearly that they want to be an active player in the SE. (*help people to find what they want nothing else*)
So in my point of view they want that most common people, when they go elswhere than their provider portal, they go to yahoo, google and why not netscape.
Exalead guys provide very good results to netscape, netscape guys provide brand plus free mail plus aim...
will it work? we will see in the futur.
Secondly, even if netscape portal is not very used (does someone has some figure about it?), they have an historical brand, and don't have to make any effort to *advertise* on their name.
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That 's quite correct.
Let's say like my grandma : wait and see.
Search for linux, for example and hit the dans les rubriques button.
It highlights in bold the category where you will find sites related to your kw.
For linux exemple, it bolds
Informatique et multimédia, then Logiciels, then Logiciel libre and Systèmes d'exploitation
(Computer and multimedia, then software, then free software and OS)
This make the browsing more intuitive.