new uk search engine

[ukseojunior]

was looking through yahoo's new listings page and saw there's a new UK Search Engine called Wotbot

looks like its a crawler based one and their results dont seem to match up with ay other SERPs, but I'm pretty new to this and could be wrong

what other uk search engines are google like, most just seem to be directories

[jrobbio]

Welcome to webmasterworld

Although the results are different, the display of them couldn't be more similar to google if they tried.
I did a search for the crawler and it appears to be something like:
Wotbot/alpha0.03_([e-mail];_http://www.wotbot.com)___Java/1.4.1_01

Jeremy Goodrich spoke of it here: [webmasterworld.com ] not having an about page, but they've obviously listened although its incredibly sketchy.

Mirago is the only one I can think of that is UK based, and has a search bot called HenrytheMiragoRobot, but I think the site has to be in the directory to be crawled.

[Monkscuba]

I guess wotbot needs some time to crawl some more pages. I did a search on my major terms, and the results were sketchy to say the least. Then I searched for our company name and our site came up as a sponsored listing...how the sam hill could that happen? I have never heard of wotbot before 2 minutes ago and we don' pay for any sponsored listings anywhere (hey, our results are good enough for free :)).

[tigger]

I can't see how any new SE can get away with charging, maybe once Joe public starts using them they can start calling the shots

[jrobbio]

I forgot to mention the adverts, the links seem to refer to a site called blowsearch.com and doing the same search there confirms it.
I just did a search on it for webmasterworld and ads for it appeared as well however this one is a direct link.

Rob

[chris_f]

not having an about page

Not having an about page? What's this then? [wotbot.co.uk] ;)

However, I do notice there is no 'add url' link.

Chris

[jrobbio]

Sorry badly conveyed my comment, what I was trying to say was there wasn't an about page when Jeremy spoke of it, but now there is one.

Rob

[tigger]

I wondered where the add URL button was hid as well

[ukseojunior]

don't you guys think it's really sad then, that there aren't any big uk players in the search engine market?

i'm surprised that big companies like bt or cable&wireless etc havn't tried to get in on it.

[wotbot]

Thanks to Rob for emailing me about this thread and asking us to come here and post. I do use webmasterworld quite often to keep up with SE news but I’ve been kinda busy and away from it lately.

Anyway, Wotbot was started last October by me and a friend of mine (just a couple of techie guys) here in the UK. We are a totally independent engine and all the technology has been built in house from scratch.

To answer a couple of your questions: the reason the database is so small is that it was only meant to be a testing index but we thought we might as well put it live to maybe get some initial user feedback. The other reason is that we have a couple of infrastructure issues to sort out before we can get growing/crawling again to a proper SE size, and they are simply bandwidth and storage (but hopefully we should have that sorted soon)

Like you guys have noticed and we’ve also had some emails asking about an ‘add url’ page, but the reason is just that because we hadn’t planned on doing any crawling or new indexing for the last couple of months, we didn’t want to disappoint people and have them wondering why the hell we hadn’t added them to the database yet. But I guarantee there will be one on the site soon.

At the moment we know we look just like any other search engine but we do have a number of special features that we plan to roll out over the next few months, including some new things on the SERPs, and really comprehensive preferences and advanced search pages

Anyway thanks to you guys for chatting about us here, and if anyone has any questions just let me know.

Mike

[edited by: engine at 8:35 am (utc) on May 6, 2003]
[edit reason] no sigs, thanks [/edit]

[bunder]

it is always good to see new players, but if wotbot is about the UK, then not too sure why a search for something like money gave on its first 10 results not one single UK result! and most of those were from CNN.

But still, it is early days and maybe what has been indexed is just demo stuff to try out their technology.

Leslie