Regards...jmcc
There are many failed UK directories / indexes, plus some new ones appearing. Do a search to see what the competition would be like, but make yours a slightly different site.
It will be tough to complete a good UK index but good luck to you. :)
Can you cover the costs and return a profit based on the 'paid entry' or advertising model that you are going to run with.
The problem with SEs like Google is that they rely a lot on IP sorting to figure out where the website is. For a small footprint country like Ireland, 30 to 50% of the sites are not hosted on Irish IP ranges. The UK seems a lot better but still with US hosting prices being so cheap, a good percentage of UK sites would not be hosted on UK ranges. By using the techniques I used to identify Irish domains/sites, it would be easy enough to create a better UK index for CNO.
Regards...jmcc
I guess its only worth it if you can clearly identify the revenue stream.
Can you cover the costs and return a profit based on the 'paid entry' or advertising model that you are going to run with.
The 'paid entry' model seems to be the most over used 4eyes. Also the problem is that it makes a directory or search engine less useful to the end user. Generating the index is essentially a few SQL statements and some spidering. Since the same db can be used for other countries, the costs are minimised. The spidering section/bandwidth would be the most costly part (especially in Ireland) of the project. Advertising is probably the best way of doing it along with feeds to other directories/SEs.
Regards...jmcc
still waiting for a real Irish search engine /directory
How far off is the DMOZ Regional/Europe/Ireland branch? I must declare an interest here - I'm one of their editors - but are you not happy with it? And why? (sorry if that's OT for this thread).
How did you solve the website country problem, or should I ask?
We're still waiting for a real Irish search engine /directory, how about a Christmas present to the nation?
It was difficult at first Glengara. :)
Basically it involved developing an internet usage model for each country and working from there. The IP basis does not work well hence the development of a usage model is critical.
I don't know if I can afford such a present having run it for the last two years. Though I should have some slack time and may be able to get the directory aspect finished. :)
Regards...jmcc
How far off is the DMOZ Regional/Europe/Ireland branch? I must declare an interest here - I'm one of their editors - but are you not happy with it? And why? (sorry if that's OT for
this thread).
The Dmoz branch is considerably off quiet_man (I think that only 1600 or so .ie sites were included compared to an active sites estimate of about 14000). A lot of Irish sites have absolutely no SEO. Dmoz relies on users submitting sites for inclusion and the fact that some areas of the Ireland branch have no editors means that it can be very much a hit and miss affair. This is the key problem that affects most directory sites. Unless a directory uses a mix of user subs and active crawling, it is always going to be beaten by the SEs. A lot of the sites in the Dmoz branch seem to be personal sites and some have not been changed for years. The key to any directory, much like any publication, is that it is kept current.
The natural progression from personal sites to redirected domains has not been that apparent with .ie as it has been with .uk or .com. From the Dmoz RDFs, the number of distinct ExternalPage links (listed websites) was 7440 links. Just in .ie alone, there are 23543 domains with websites. However the number of active websites would be lower. The directory flaw means that most of these websites will be missed by Dmoz.
Regards...jmcc
If your techology really can fix the errors that Google is having regionally, why not sound them out about a deal - save yourself the headache of launching your own service only for
G to buy it further down the line. Or have you had the stickymail from Googleguy already?
E-mailed Google about a month ago and never heard anything back quiet_man. :)
Regards...jmcc
I hope it's "knows" and not the latter, otherwise they'd be wasting an opportunity.
I hope it's "knows" and not the latter, otherwise they'd be wasting an opportunity.
I think it would be the latter engine. The latest stats (from this weekend's spider/SE run) on .ie are not that good.
Domains With Websites:23558
Websites Without Page Title:2930
Websites Without Page Keywords:11010
Websites Without Page Description:11410
Websites With Page Title:14955
Websites With Page Keywords:6875
Websites With Page Description:6475
Websites With Title And Keywords:6826
Websites With Title,Descriptions,Keywords:6177
SEO does not seem to be regarded as being that important by .ie website owners. The pattern would probably be continued so that many of these sites will not get included in directories like Dmoz. In fact I think the only reason that many of these sites end up in Google and the big engines is because of them being mentioned in one or two Irish directories.
Regards...jmcc
I'm holding out for when they finally "get" SEO in this country!
Regards...jmcc
We're still waiting for a real Irish search engine /directory
You mean Jsearch.ie isn't good enough?! ;)
Woohooo! First post! :) (have been lurking for a while)
You would have to be prepared to stick it out for a year or two before being able to build up a large user base I bet.
Which brings me to the next poin; how will it be funded? PPC from Espotting and Overture? Banners? pop-ups? paid daily spidering?
I would probably try to grab a slice of Overture for now - you may get up to 40% of click rates!
As for promotion, well that is another matter. Try to be #1 for terms like 'UK search engine'?
Ive got a regional UK directory and its going fine - my traffic is increasing by about 1000 UVs a month.
Granted, overall its not much compared to the big players, but for a hobby / 1st / trail run site its not bad.
My point is that there are ways to promote your site outwith the conventional means.
Successful marketing is like successful content - originality wins every time!
If you are offering decent results to your users (ie you have quality of product) then there are tonnes of unexploited marketing avenues u can take.
My 2c! :)
JOAT
Your problem will be getting enough people to use it. Are people likely to come along and use your engine just because it is there? I think that so many smaller engines/directories fail because they don't have enough appeal to attract uses away from Google and the other bigger players.
The main selling point on this would be that it would include verified UK pages only. As such the index would be of a better quality than Google. Doing a CNO index is actually a lot easier for me and this would probably be the area to specialise in rather than just the .uk.
You would have to be prepared to stick it out for a year or two before being able to build up a large user base I bet.
This is a critical aspect. Whereas I don't have the marketing program of jsearch, I think that the aspect of quality, niche searching may be the way to go. The .ie site I did has been in operation for about two years and though it is not even advertised, it still gets about 1000-2500 page impressions a day. But it also is the biggest directory of .ie websites and domains so it would get hammered by the search engines as well as it is the only active new Irish websites listing on the web.
Which brings me to the next poin; how will it be funded? PPC from Espotting and Overture? Banners? pop-ups? paid daily spidering?
The banners/sponsorship idea seems to be the way to go. Also I was thinking of developing a feed service for new UK websites to other SEs and directories. Since this would be actively acquiring new UK sites, it would be 3 to 8 weeks fresher than Google or Alltheweb (though I am not sure if Everflux/freshbot would be indexing new domains within hours of them being registered). The freshness angle is also a good selling point as it would provide a new sites/domains list as well.
I have to run some historical analysis on the UK's CNO domain ownership (over the next few days) to get an idea of the numbers of new UK CNOs registered on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
Regards...jmcc
i thought the reason for google page rank was to introduce an element of peer voting for a website and hence raise the quality of the index. a collection of new websites is likely to dilute the quality of the index isn't it?
Yes but page ranking and freshness are two separate things. Google's page ranking is good but its freshness is not. A rapidly updating search engine/directory would have an edge on the bigger engines because it would be leaner and more efficient.
The other factor is that many of the larger SEs do not create good country related indexes. The methods they tend to use are basically the IP of the hosting site and the cctld (.ie .uk etc). Now with US hosting being so cheap, a lot of websites are going to be hosted on US IP ranges and thus the SEs would miss them. Then you have the really poorly thought out solutions that makes a fast index from just the country's cctld. This restricts the searches and the results to those from websites just having a .uk or .ie extension.
Regards...jmcc
Biggest issue was customising and editing it and we are still going through it, removing out of date links, renaming sections to make it more user-friendly and also adding new entries.
No doubt folks will be asking, "So how will it make money?" Well, we are avoiding, banners, buttons and pop-ups. we are also avoiding Espotting/Overture style listings. There are a number of sponsors who will be getting involved. That's all I can say at this stage :)
I'm not sure if you are allowed to post URLsof your sites on this forum, so won't post it here now, other than if you look at my e-mail address, the address for the site is there :)
Leslie
Like many others I got fed up with the lack of any real UK directories (apart from Open Directory ) A few years back there
was the likes of UK Plus, UK Max, UK Index and many others and today, really nothing that is just Web directory focused.
I left some of the domain analysis programs run here over Christmas and so far, 523980 UK websites have been detected on the first run. The drift away from directory based sites is probably due to a plateau effect when the number of new websites being added almost grinds to a halt. The other part is that directories tend to get reamed fairly rapidly as soon as they go live. The single biggest killer, apart from the finance angle, for a directory is the lack of new websites.
Regards...jmcc
You certainly make some good points there. The other big issue of course is that directories also need to make sure that the out of date and dead Web sites are removed as quickly as possible.
As far as the lack of new sites, the issue there is making sure that what you have got is maintained on a regular basis and refreshed.
We are looking to make sure we certainly address those issues :)
Leslie
I don't have good enough data yet to make estimates of the dead websites in UK CNO space. However the figures for .ie (the Irish cctld) are fairly bad. Of pages returning Last-Modified data:
Websites Last Updated 2002: 9478
Websites Last Updated 2001: 2706
Websites Last Updated 2000: 1111
Websites Last Updated 1999: 232
Websites Last Updated 1998: 51
I am only just getting around to analysing the UK com/net/org website data and I would expect to find at least 150K of the present UK sites count pointing to holding pages. (This is a quick level scan so another million or so UK sites exist but won't show up until I increase the resolution of the scan. (Very Star Trekish ;) ).
Dmoz seems to suffer from link rot but the size of the site makes it more apparent. Just on Irish owned websites and domains, about 1000-1500 new Irish owned CNOs are registered each month with about 500-750 being deleted. I would expect to see a proportionate new:deleted rate for the UK modified perhaps by the fact that a .co.uk is a lot cheaper than a .ie. Most Irish companies/firms/people opt for a .com rather than a .ie as it can cost up to 156 euros a year for a .ie - a .com can cost about 12 Euros.
Regards...jmcc
I can see the advantages of language specific search engine but what is the point of a country specific search engine?
A friend of mine in the UK was able to fly to New York for the weekend and buy his chosen digital camera with accessories all for an inclusive cost which was less than just buying the goods alone in the UK. And he had a fun time!
If you want to buy something that is expensive to ship or something that might not work (like a TV) a few minutes research on Google is likely to produce better results than any country specific search engine imo.
Sorry to throw a curve ball here but isn't one of the advantages of the web, for the consumer, that it provides a global market.
%<snip>%
If you want to buy something that is expensive to ship or something that might not work (like a TV) a few minutes research on Google is likely to produce better
results than any country specific search engine imo.
The main problem with Google, and search engines like it, is that its country indexes are pretty rotten in some cases. The bigger engines tend to use IP sorting as the basis for deciding where a website is based and then use the country's cctld (uk/ie etc) to build up that index. The problem is that sites hosted outside of the country's IP range are missed by the SEs like Google. Now for a large country like the UK, that margin of error is not an extreme problem. However for smaller countries where most of the CNO websites are hosted outside the country's IP ranges, some 30-50% of the CNO sites could be missed in a simple search.
The web does provide a global market but in some cases, a properly run local directory or search engine has a major advantage over Google. The big SEs tend to use a shotgun approach to deciding what is and is not relevant to each country. However a local directory or search engine has a considerable edge over Google in that they tend to have a far better clue about what is down the road than Google or Altavista etc. Perhaps these directories give a more human view of what is available and that editorial aspect is very difficult to replicate with a ranking algorithm.
I think that there is a niche market for local (country) directories and search engines even if Google et al have the main general market.
Regards...jmcc
In some countries, local people there may not want to feel they have to use a "foreign" owned search engine or directory but rather feel more comfortable with something that is created and edited at a local level.
The key thing is delivering something that is of value, it means that you need to invest time and indeed some money as well to develop your proposition, rather than just take an existing product and leaving it as is.
I draw an analogy with two examples. The Press Association (PA) here in the UK offers its newsfeeds to many places like BBC, ITN (ITV News) etc. Often the same story will appear across different outlets in a similar way with very little modification. The same story appearing on say the ITV News site will often look and read the same way as the story appearing on Ananova or the BBC or some other outlet. The reader of the story will be unaware of the source, but aware of how it is packaged and that is where value is put in. BBC may slightly tweaked it, ITN may slightly tweak it as well and the re-packaged offering will appeal to different people.
Another example is Cola drinks. Tesco, Asda, Safeway etc, all tend to use the same supplier for Cola drinks namely Cott. The formula is about the same, but again it is tweaked in a different way for each outlet and packaged in a different way. The user doesn't care it came from Cott, but rather they identify with how it has been branded and packaged.
Leslie
>>The web does provide a global market but in some cases, a properly run local directory or search engine has a major advantage over Google. The big SEs tend to use a shotgun approach to deciding what is and is not relevant to each country. However a local directory or search engine has a considerable edge over Google in that they tend to have a far better clue about what is down the road than Google or Altavista etc. Perhaps these directories give a more human view of what is available and that editorial aspect is very difficult to replicate with a ranking algorithm.
I think that there is a niche market for local (country) directories and search engines even if Google et al have the main general market.<<
