Searching For A Clue?
A few days ago, the contact e-mail for the WhoisIreland.com spider got an e-mail to say that the site had been included in Ireland’s only dedicated search engine. Considering that WhoisIreland.com is the web’s biggest Irish search engine, it was a rather surreal thing. The fact that there are at least one other Irish search engine and a pile of other Irish web directories made it all the stranger. That and the fact that the e-mail began “A Chara”. This is the way that all the Irish government agencies used to start letters like tax demands.
Some of us Irish search engine and directory operators invest thousands of Euros in dedicated servers and research and building sites. But the Irish search and directory business is not exactly the business for the clueless. It is a tough battleground where only the best survive against the behemoths like Google and Yahoo.
Fergal O’Byrne’s OMNI SEO blog posted an interview with the operator of the site. It didn’t seem to be quite on the level of a real interview. Sure the buzz words and the marketing speak were all in place but the cornerstone of the business was missing. It seems that everyone sees search engine results and thinks that building and maintaining search engines is as easy as sticking a few URLs in an off the shelf php script on a shared hosting account and calling it a search engine.
The comments on Fergal’s blog were interesting in that some others contacted regarded the e-mails as spam. Though I’m still trying to figure out why someone would e-mail a search engine’s contact e-mail to tell it that it was included in a search engine. Such are the perils of being a search engine operator. I wonder how Google deals with it?
Tag: Irishblogs - Search - Irish Search Engines
Written by John McCormac on June 17th, 2005 with
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junior
#1. June 19th, 2005, at 5:20 PM.
Could be just the weather. Though if it is a MySQL backend, it could be a case of poorly chosen indices (a very common problem with databases). Writing the code for a search engine is a very difficult task. Though from looking at the results, it looked like a PHP script with a MySQL database or a flatfile database.
The whole Pay Per Click and advertising on search engine results spiel is nothing new. From what I remember of the site, the advertisers on the site seemed to be webdev clients rather than real advertisers.