Eu Search Market?

Is it worth building a .eu only search engine?

[jmccormac]

I've posted a similar question in the Alternative Search Engines forum but this is also a European question:

Is it worth building a .eu only search engine or is it too early in the evolution of .eu as a domain? While .eu is currently at about 1.7 million domains registered, it is dwarfed in credibility by .de and .uk. Or would it be better to create some kind of hybrid directory/search engine purely for .eu?

Regards...jmcc

[MiragoGuy]

Hi jmcc,

I have pondered this question a fair bit over the last few months and feel that we should be asking - would a .EU TLD search engine be of any use to anyone?

You have to bear in mind that the EU has approx 25 member countries and a similar number of member languages. I can't remember the exact example, but I've often been told that "whore" means "person" in Swedish. Obviously I’m at pains to point out that I’ve probably made that up in the absence of a decent memory for names and words. It does however highlight the difficulty of a "one search box" approach to searching Europe. Very few people speak more than one EU language - if you search a single .EU index for "hotel" sense of all the results?

Many engines, Mirago included, will make good use of this new TLD. Initially I think we will see most engines using it within the relative safety of a simple addition to existing geographic indexes - e.g. adding French language .EU pages to the French index. We’re intending to launch something quite exciting later this year which takes an alternative approach, and I’ll post about that closer to the time.

Just my two "euro" cents.

Nick

[rencke]

I've often been told that "whore" means "person" in Swedish

No it most certainly doesn't. But "sex" in Swedish is "six" (6) in English and there are quite a few similar examples from other langages, which are pointless to list, since the language checker at WebmasterWorld will catch them.

Otherwise, I agree that a search engine for .eu doesn't fill any purpose whatsoever.

[jmccormac]

I have pondered this question a fair bit over the last few months and feel that we should be asking - would a .EU TLD search engine be of any use to anyone?

It is an early days question Nick,
Google might have an edge but in a denied zone it just spiders blind.

It does however highlight the difficulty of a "one search box" approach to searching Europe. Very few people speak more than one EU language - if you search a single .EU index for "hotel" sense of all the results?

It is an opportunity to make the index smart, perhaps breaking it down on a language/country basis.

Many engines, Mirago included, will make good use of this new TLD.

But will it be an organic or planned growth? That's the tricky question. The 'pages from' aspect is perhaps as far as Google can get at the moment. It has always relied on simplistic IP/cctld sorting. But I think there is an opportunity for much more development. I've got about 1.25M .eu domains identified at the moment and I am doing some analysis to see what kind of a webspace .eu actually has. As with any new gTLD there is a large element of speculative registrations and protective registrations. The incompetence of Eurid and its validation agent PriceWaterhouseCoopers BE in checking only 1000 Sunrise applications a day means that the business core of .eu will not appear perhaps until Christmas. This makes mapping .eu more interesting because the growth pattern will be different from that of a mature gTLD.

Regards...jmcc