New Spanish Search Engine

Noxtrum

[WebWalla]

Spain's biggest-selling newspaper, El País, yesterday published an article [elpais.es] (in Spanish, obviously) saying that TPI, part of the Telefonica group, will launch a new search engine called Noxtrum before the end of the year.

They are developing their own spider for Spanish and Portuguese pages, and it looks like they will outsource the development of spiders for other languages. Some webmasters have already noted the bot visiting their pages. [webmasterworld.com]

The search engine will capitalise on TPI's existing Yellow Pages database so that when a searcher is looking for a local business, even those companies without webpages will appear in the results.

The article is a little contradictory, in as much that it says the SERPs will not be determined by advertising and then goes on to say that the business model is based on PFI. Probably they have got the terms confused and they will have organic SERPs supplemented by PPC "a la Google".