Superfast new french engine launched: Dir.com

[heini]

Illiad, the group holding Free.fr has developed a new version of their search engine. It's online at [dir.com...]

Free.fr is expected to drop their current provider, Google, after the test phase.

Dir.com offers an ultra lean interface and very speedy results. On first tests relvancy was very good.
The index currently holds ~50 Mill pages, french only.
Filetypes include pdf, doc, Excel and Flash files.

Thanks to indicateur.com for the tip.

[Tor]

Very nice find heini. I`ll try it out a bit this afternoon.

[DeepIndex]

Hi,

yes good project, quite fast, but ... the project manager seems to leave the project and i'm not sure that there will be a good issue. You should look at this interesting thread at WebrankInfo (similar to webmasterworld but in french, very actif since a few months) about dir.com

http://www.webrankinfo.com/forums/viewtopic_1364.htm

best regards

[edited by: heini at 9:15 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2003]

[Tor]

My French is not at all good enough to understand the discussion that you are referring to DeepIndex. Maybe you can explain in a few words? :)

[DeepIndex]

My pleasure, i hope my translation will be good enough, but globaly, the project manager is about or is going to leave the project dir.com, which was initially supposed to be the se of the provider (and the group behind). I tell the project manager to pass by here at webmasterworld, i might give you complete infos. ok?

[onlineleben]

> Dir.com offers an ultra lean interface ....<

But where is the add-url button?

[Tor]

I tell the project manager to pass by here at webmasterworld, i might give you complete infos. ok?

That would be fine DeepIndex. Thank you so far.

[heini]

>add url
As I said, just the bare essentials ;)

The spider has been spotted here before. It's somewhere in the archives here, UA is Iliad or similar.

[Fabien]

Hi,

I am Fabien Menemenlis, the project manager for dir.com.
I am indeed leaving Iliad basically because I wanted to concentrate on this search engine, we were just 2 working on it but we were really believing in it. But in Iliad's view there were other priorities, and the other projects are just of no interest to me.
Not to mention I always had trouble to get the needed hardware ressources (currently there are just 4 computers for the search engine and 2 for the crawler). And even if there were still some imperfections, we were stuck with hardware limitations.
Anyway, if you have some questions I can try to answer you.

[heini]

Hello Fabien, welcome to WebmasterWorld. Thanks for stopping by.

So do you see a chance the search engine at dir.com will replace Google at Free.fr?

[caine]

Had a quick try on it, its certainly fast at bringing the serps, didn't realise there were so many morphs of DMOZ from french based vortals/portals/directories.

[Fabien]

dir.com could have indeed replaced Google on free.fr if we were able to do something different or better than Google for the french language (Google has no mature content filter for the french language for example, we already have one). It wasn't impossible I think, Free hosts thousands of personal pages, we could have indexed them. And we had other ideas to go above the "google clone" syndrome.
But the Free staff loves Google :) It's because we're part of the same group that we could have replaced Google without a good reason.

[Fabien]

er.. I meant "it's NOT because we're part of the same group that we could have replaced Google without a good reason" :)