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.

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Written by John McCormac on September 24th, 2006 with 16 comments.
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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Richard Hearne
#1. September 24th, 2006, at 11:01 AM.

New blog theme?

Wondered why reader picked up all your posts as new.

But is there any need for a .eu SE? I wonder how the main SE’s (G,Y,MSN) are treating .eu for country only searches? I haven’t seen many .eu domains returned for searches thus far.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#2. September 24th, 2006, at 11:49 PM.

Well at the latest count, I’ve just over 78% of .eu mapped. It might be an interesting exercise but most of the sites in .eu are probably parked or PPC linkswamps.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#3. September 25th, 2006, at 4:39 AM.

Yep Richard. The old Wordpress was getting a bit flakey with Technorati updates but the new one seems no different. (Technorati is still not pulling the updates despite being pinged.) Google has over 69 M .eu pages but I don’t know if they are genuine pages.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#4. September 25th, 2006, at 4:43 AM.

Yep Michele,
Most of the good directory domains in .eu have been squatted by Ovidio/Pool/Snapnames etc.

Still the directory idea might be possible. But first I have to get this Wordpress installation working properly :)

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#5. September 25th, 2006, at 6:54 AM.

The number of new blogs in .eu is unusual Danny :)
Though it does offer some hope for the future of .eu as the bloggers tend to be the early adopters in this. Sometimes they bring in the other developers.

I should have enough for a pre-index of .eu sites in the next few days and will probably do some sample runs to get an idea of the number of real websites. But I expect that most of the sites will be holding/parking pages. But on the upside, I have a Celeron 433 I can use as a .eu search engine box. :)

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Richard Hearne
#6. September 25th, 2006, at 9:37 AM.

Google might be indexing the pages but I wonder how well they rank for search?

I am also trying to find out how Google treats .eu TLD in the case of country only searches. I know that Google uses both TLD and server location in dteremining the country origin of a domain - I wonder how this applies to .eu?

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#7. September 25th, 2006, at 10:47 AM.

Google is going to have a real headache if it tries to match the .eu TLD with IPs. It will have to apply some decent filtering algorithms to remove the linkswamp networks as well. These seem to be the only massively linked .eu sites at the moment. For example that apparently Swiss owned UK front company that registered WATERFORDCASTLE.EU is hosted in Romania (it has around 40K .eu domains squatted). Then there are the auction sites like Sedo and Afternic. And as for the .eu domains with dodgy registrant data, these are going to be all over the net.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Richard Hearne
#8. September 25th, 2006, at 1:06 PM.

Hmm.. from the sounds of that its going to be very difficult to get .eu domains ranked for competitive terms. I can see quite a lot of Google bombing required for anybody hoping to get much SE traffic.

Sedo seem to be doing quite nicely from the whole affair - I see they sold hotels.eu for an onscene figure there a week or two ago.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#9. September 25th, 2006, at 1:14 PM.

I think the existing hierarchy of domains (com/cctld, net,org,info,biz) will still apply for the near future. The .eu domains currently registered (based on the 79% or so I’ve mapped) are very spammy in terms of keywords. If Google cannot sort out a decent linkswamp filter, it may end up having the penalise all .eu domains wrt .com/.cctld sites.

I’m not quite sure about that hotels.eu sale. It doesn’t look right. But Sedo are trying to hype up .eu sales and one big sale covers up the hundreds of thousands of reg fee .eu domains that may lapse in 12 - 18 months.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#10. September 25th, 2006, at 11:37 PM.

The split dns/www thing is not that unusal when it comes to parked domains. It allows a domainer to have a healthy domain count on his DNS. It also makes it more difficult for search engines to deepsix a linkswamp operation by knocking all sites associated with a particular DNS out of an index.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#11. April 8th, 2007, at 3:47 PM.

Well with over 2 million identified .eu domains here, you’ll probably show up somewhere in them. Some of the people I was referring to have control over 40K or more .eu domains. Of the directory type domains, 847 of them are tracked at present. You are probably one of the few people actually bothering to develop anything in .eu as most people are ignoring it completely due to the cybersquatting and warehousing problem.

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