Searchtheowl Gets Size Of Irish Web Wrong - Again!

Searchtheowl , the search engine that reinvented itself as a directory seems to have gotten more facts wrong. A post on the Searchtheowl blog really proved that Mike Russen still does not have a clue about the size of the Irish web.

The truth is is in the world scale Ireland comes around 49th in the world for the rankings for country domain names .ie 22,000.

As of today, there are 63118 .ie domains. So basically, Mike Russen thinks that there are almost three times less .ie domains than there really are. The last time the .ie ccTLD was at 22000 domains was in 2001. It is not difficult to find these domain statistics.

Russen gives the following reason for converting searchtheowl to a directory. It is somewhat offensive but it was probably meant in jest:

When you think that there are 4.5 million alcholics [sic] clinging to rock in the atlantic ocean, the question became “was it worth trying to help local business” - the answer a resounding NO! It became quite boring trying to explain things so gave up. Thats why we stopped searching Ireland.

I think that Russen found out the hard way that user submissions only work when there is sufficient traffic on a web directory. Beyond that, the process has to either involve a lot of people (like Dmoz) or be automated (as in the way that spiders crawl the web). And for a country level search engine the problems are compounded. With millions of new websites appearing every month, the country level search engine is faced with detecting the handful that might be relevant.

One of the most important aspects of country level search engine design is to have an idea of the size of the webspace that you intend to search. Otherwise you could end up like Searchtheowl - trying to spider what could be upwards of a 15 million page webspace with a php script on some budget shared hosting.

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Written by John McCormac on July 7th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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7 comments

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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#1. July 7th, 2006, at 10:22 PM.

I would have thought a different planet :) but he seems to be going down the MFA route.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Richard
#2. July 22nd, 2006, at 9:44 PM.

Whats the deal with the 4.5 million remark? Chip on shoulder or something?

I have to wonder if there is a real need for a country specific SE? At the end of the day it all comes down to the quality of the SERPs and I can’t help feeling that with Google so entrenched it will be an uphill struggle for any country specific SE to gain any critical mass.

Interested to see what Scrudu will be like and how they will determine their SERPs.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#3. July 22nd, 2006, at 11:33 PM.

I’m not sure what he was up to with the 4.5 million comment but the rest of his rant didn’t look too well structured either.

Well Google still has major problems when it comes to country level search. It is an uphill struggle but the worst thing for any country level SE is gaining critical mass too quickly. And of course there is the problem of maintaining a number of search indices (one live, one updating and one back up). I think that country level search is the one area in which Google can be defeated but it takes a lot of resources and planning to do it properly.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Richard
#4. July 23rd, 2006, at 10:01 AM.

Well I agree that country level search might have some opportunities but for market the size of Ireland? I have to wonder? On the other hand, that small size might just be an opportunity I suppose.

While a good backend is required to deliver quality SERPs, I reckon the real barrier here is getting brand recognition and building any sort of market share - a very tricky task. Probably would require some very deep pockets (or an exceptionally good viral/guerilla marketing campaign).

WRT Google, something tells me they are not going to sit on their hands while the quality of their SERPs deteriorates. I think they are already starting to address some of their current issues.

[OT] Is there a complete lisitng of all .ie domains available for download anywhere?

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#5. July 23rd, 2006, at 10:53 AM.

Well Ireland is a very small market and it is more like a test market for any real search engine play. The conventional methods of building brand recognition are useless I think. People have largely accepted that the people who write for ENN/Siliconrepublic etc are really just press release recyclers and are therefore not credible. As a result, a viral marketing approach would be better and the best way to do that would be to have either superior results or a unique selling point.

Google’s main approach to country level search is to use ccTLDs and IPs. As a market matures, there is a shift on hosting back from the low price countries such as the US and UK towards the ccTLD’s country. This has happened in Ireland over the last few years and more Irish sites are hosted on Irish IPs now than in the past. However some problems still occur when Irish hosters use subnets that have been redelegated as IE IP space on large US hosters. The simplistic method used by some search engines relies on the big IP lists (the delegated IP lists) and these subnets do not show up there. This leads to some of these Irish hosters still appearing as US hosted in the SERPs.

Google has some very smart people working for it but I am not worried about them. What worries me about Google is its technical resources. A country level search operation is always has comparatively limited resources so it is forced to be smarter and more innovative than its Tier 1 search engine opponents. But that only gets you so far.

The complete list of .ie domains is not available for download due to IEDR’s concern over spam.