Searchtheowl.com Searchengine Goes Dead Parrot

Searchtheowl.com has given up being “Ireland’s only dedicated search engine”. The move from trying to be a search engine to being a web directory has much in common with Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch. A post on the Searchtheowl.com blog seemed to be upset with the internet community in Dublin for questioning Searchtheowl.com’s pretensions. Though the post on Scrudu.ie just mentioned that Searchtheowl.com had finally given up on trying to run an Irish search engine.

I really don’t think that Mike Russen (the operator of searchtheowl.com) understood the magnitude of the work involved in running a country level search engine. The software used by searchtheowl.com for running the search engine was a glorified site search site rather than one suitable for running a search engine that covers at least 100K sites. And that is only indexing the index page on each site. Going beyond that would involve indexing nearly a million webpages depending on how deeply the spider was to spider each site.

Then there is the site acquisition process where new websites have to be added to the search engine and indexed. User submissions only work when there is sufficient traffic - a Catch 22 situation for any new search engine or directory. And more than one search index has to be maintained. I don’t think that Searchtheowl.com ever got sufficient traffic to create a genuine flow of new website submissions.

It just is not as easy as sticking a php script on a website and hoping for the best. That said, we in the Irish search engine business wish Mike the best of luck with his web directory.

Tag: Irishblogs - Search - Irish Search Engines

Written by John McCormac on June 27th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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Eurid happy to let cybersquatters profit from squatting .eu domains.

A post on the Out-Law.com website carried quotes from Eurid that should be grounds for Eurid being stripped of .eu registry functions. Eurid is not worried about cybersquatting - it only cares that the whois data is “valid”. But given its lack of competence on trivial registry operations, how could the people tell if the whois data is valid?

In the next 24 hours, the 2 Millionth .eu domain will be registered. The growth of .eu since April 7th has been high but the registration rates have been falling off since those landrush days. But the big question is how many .eu domains have been cybersquatted or registered with bogus whois details.

Eurid doesn’t care - all it is interested in is the money. The bogus registrars are still there. The second landrush was a mess due to these crooks. And contrary to EU law, .eu domains are being auctioned off. These days, it is difficult to tell the Eurid registry from the cybersquatters.

Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU, .ie, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics , Eurid, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on June 27th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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