Building A .eu Search Engine?

Is it worth spending time building a .eu search engine? The launch of .eu has been a disaster because an incompetent registry couldn’t deal with the whole TLD being subverted by some clever business people. But even so there must be a few thousand new sites in .eu that are not PPC mortgage, creditcard or ringtone linkswamps.

Most .eu websites, so far, are either “coming soon” pages, PPC network pages or parking pages. There is very little evidence of major sites using their .eu domain as a primary identity. Most are just pointing their .eu domain at their main .com or .ccTLD website. Ironically this narrows down the problem to finding that rarest of things - a genuine .eu website.

They exist but they are mainly blogs. The newness of the .eu ccTLD has provided some opportunity for bloggers to build new .eu based blogs using domains that were not available in .com gTLD. But blogs do not make a TLD and it may well be years before there are any major, unique, sites in .eu ccTLD. This does mean that if the dross can be removed, a small and fast search engine covering .eu is feasible.

Tags: Irishblogs,Searchengines .EU, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on September 24th, 2006 with 16 comments.
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