At this rate, we'll be losing 1 per year. Perhaps 2. In 2007, I think that figure will double to 4, as funding is very tough to get and any 3rd tiers can't compete with the technology that the majors have. I think the 3rd tiers will go bust first.
By the way I agree that it looks like tough times for any search engine outside of the big four (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves)
Mirago
Abrexa
UK Plus
Lycos
the rest are feeds.
As far as I know both Lycos and Abrexa take results from external sources.
Haven't checked UK Plus recently but if memory serves me correctly it was a searchable directory.
The only other UK spidering engine I know of is UK Wizz.
It could have been good. Shame.
If I had Daily Mails cashflow, I'd put together a search engine alright. Probably hoping to get bought out.
As far as I know both Lycos and Abrexa take results from external sources.Abrexa was spidering European sites failry heavily at one stage. I actually saw a spider from Lycos the other morning though in traffic terms, Lycos has fallen off the edge of the world since the advent of Google.
The lifetime of a small search engine (based on looking at the Irish search business) seems to be around 18 months. So I guess many of the small SEs started in 2003 would be reaching a breakpoint around now.
Regards...jmcc
They no longer have a decent brand and hardly have any traffic.
The results are from Yahoo.
[edited by: rconway at 8:08 am (utc) on Aug. 23, 2005]
and any 3rd tiers can't compete with the technology that the majors have.I don't think that you are right about this. The big players have a long way to go to producing a decent country-level search engine. Most of them are stil using the IP/cctTLD categorisation to produce their "pages from $country" results and this clearly removes relevant websites that are hosted outside the country's IP ranges or ccTLDs from the results.
Over the past month or so, I've been running a project here to check all websites on com/net/org/biz/info/ie and correlate them on an IP basis. A limited run of one of the algorithms I've developed managed to detect over 1100 Irish websites hosted outside Irish IP space/ccTLD in a few minutes. A short check on some of these websites showed that they were not in the "pages from Ireland" results from the major search engines. Now 1100 site may not seem like a lot but it is approximately equal to 1% of the (detected) Irish web. Extrapolating it for the UK or any other major European country casts a new light on the "missing web" aspect of the major search engines' "pages from $country" searches.
This missing web is a serious vulnerability for many of the big Tier 1 search engines and it could easily be exploited by Tier 3 (country level) search engines.
Regards...jmcc
Exploited in what way? I'm not with you. Ability to search accurately for local companies?By having a superior country level index to the big players. The big search engines are great at macro searches but lousy at micro searching. With a country level search engine, you automatically have limits on what is included. Therefore you can refine you index and give the searchers what they want. It is quite a different approach to how the Tier 1 SEs do things. they spider everything and hope that their algorithms gives the data relevance. With a country level search engine, the all data is relevant from the start. The unique selling point of a country level (tier 3) search engine is that it provides an excellent country level search. This is something that the big Tier 1 SEs do not do.
It does take time to build traffic as a Tier 3 SE but having a better country level index than Google or Yahoo or MSN is a great selling point.
Regards...jmcc
On the other hand Mirago are well ahead of the majors in regards to local search in the UK, but I can't see them holding that lead for long once Google roll out their local search outside of the US.
That's the theory anyway - in practice the country specific engines have the same algo problems as the majors in regards to spam content and less resources for dealing with them.Actually because the index size is smaller, dealing with spam content is a lot simpler and faster - just DeepSix the offender and that's it.
On the other hand Mirago are well ahead of the majors in regards to local search in the UK, but I can't see them holding that lead for long once Google roll out their local search outside of the US.I'm not sure about Mirago in general search terms, but the regionalisation of results is good. With the UK, local search will be easy for Google due to the Postcode>geographical coordinate system. But will Google be able to solve the relevance problem with local search? The Yellow Pages approach still works best at this level and as such, there are other players who could cause problems for Google.
Regards...jmcc
It was just one that went bust then.
