No, I’m not talking about elgooG.
The Sydney Morning Herald published an article entitled “New Australian search engine launched” today, the first paragraph of which reads “Australia’s newest search engine Ansearch opens for business today with a novel twist, demographic searching.” It’s not a particularly well written article, but the article vendor is AAP, not the SMH itself, so we’ll leave that alone, at least for the minute.
It goes on to laud the search engine for their innovation, both in this feature of demographic searching, and in other areas:
Ansearch says it cuts down search clutter by displaying the main search results as single websites and not the individual pages of websites.
What, like the Google [More results from domainname] feature? You know, the one that actually works properly? I say “works properly”, because a quick search of Ansearch reveals that their “cutting search clutter” feature is a tad broken — not to mention their character encoding.
Speaking of broken character encoding, let’s take a look at their source… well, they get some marks — at least they bothered with a Content-Type. Never mind if the content is broken when displayed with that Content-Type — it’s not like a search engine could actually do any useful data processing to make things display correctly when using a slightly redundant Content-Type… oh, wait, disregard that comment: they’re not using a doctype, either.
See, what gets me is that this search engine has just been launched. Which means the climate in which it’s been developed isn’t the same as 5 years ago, when accessibility was just on the very edges of the radar — you’d (wishfully) imagine that at least a doctype wouldn’t be too much to ask for, even if they still insisted on using table-based layouts. Interestingly enough, that’s what one of their software providers, Omniture, have done. Which leaves something of a foul taste in the mouth, too, because they’re reselling that garbage to people — including, if you believe their website, three of the five top Fortune 500 companies (aside: doesn’t that make them three of the top Fortune 5?).
Perhaps that criticism is unfair — their latest version (assuming that’s what powers their own website, although possibly not… maybe their internal web team accepts that their product would be overkill, and coded it in Dreamweaver, instead… some of the JavaScript certainly looks Dreamweaver-esque, and, if Ansearch’s website is any example, the doctype probably doesn’t come from the Overture system!) seems to handle much better than what Ansearch are running: I say this, because apparently they’re using a version which was written back in 2003. Hey, if it works… but we’ve already established it doesn’t.
And there concludes my rave review of yet another quite-some-way-from innovative and fresh search engine, this time in Australian waters.
Note: I’m not saying it’s any worse in terms of accessibility, usability, and semantics than most other search engines are — only that it has less excuse, being launched now, as opposed to 5 or 10 years ago. It’s easier to make something work first time than it is to haphazardly patch over it later, especially something as gargantuan as I’d imagine a search engine would be.
Oh, and now for something that’s just plain amusing — the number 1 search terms on this brand new search engine, from befuddled users wondering why it sucks so much:
Yes indeed, the first thing users did was try to escape… how’s that for telling?
Good review… sloppy coding and silly results are not all there is to Ansearch. Have a look at the write up here -
http://www.scumware.com/apps/scumware.php/action::view_article/article_id::1112336733/topic::Articles/
interesting!
By the way — where are you seeing the Week March 28, 2005 — it shows Week March 21, 2005 here.
(maybe the results were bad & they had to keep an old one in)
Yeah I’d say your theory wasn’t far off… I just snapped that from the default page they had up for stats, so who knows. Perhaps the first thing everyone does on landing on an unknown search website is try and search out to Google — I know people here who type web addresses into the Google search bar, because that’s the home page, rather than using the browser address bar… so that’s probable.
LOL — here is another very interesting thing…
It seems Ansearch censors it’s search terms and results.
Try searching on msn for a term like “ansearch sucks” — THIS page is #1 at the moment.
Try searching on any search engine for “anysearchengine sucks” and you will get results… “sucks” sites are common and often used and are recognised by domain name dispute resolution processes as legit.
Now try searching for the term first mentioned on Ansearch.. nothing? try just “sucks” and look at the “related terms” over on the right — it indicates a “popular” term.. or so one would assume.
I see three choices (not all family friendly) yet clicking on them tells me ‘THERE ARE NO RESULTS”
Now, why would they do that? Censored results? Results that are skewed? Hiding something?
Maybe results like that are the reason why their top 100 are so stale.
Having been a loyal Google supporter until recently, I must admit that I use Ansearch and have been extremely satisfied with the results.
There seem to be a very select few who appear on every web forum possible to try to knock down this tall poppy. If these negative PR-spinners spent as much time building up their own businesses with the time trying to generate negativity against this Australian search engine that is offering the industry ‘choice’, they would probably have no time left to think about anyone else’s business.
If you think of Google, Yahoo and MSN who have been around for at least a decade, they have had plenty of time and resources to perfect their offerings. Support Australian business and give these guys a go. No site is perfect; look at Telstra.…not a great site but not doing badly for their shareholders.
Consumers have choice. If you don’t like Ansearch, go elsewhere but what is the point of slandering them when they are simply one of many sites who present users with a search capability. I don’t like Sensis. I go elsewhere but can’t see the benefit in broadcasting negative information.
Freedom of choice.…
Tall Poppy Blocker; I’m not working for any other search engines. My critique was entirely objective in that regard — I have no professional obligation to say what I said, aside from my personal views, which are incidentally, and luckily for me, endorsed by the business I work for.
If you read the original article I posted and then the thread of comments, you’d see my criticism is of their apparent lack of innovation despite receiving praise for such a thing. If it makes you feel better, think of it as a criticism of the Sydney Morning Herald’s journalistic ability (and, if we were to extend that further, perhaps journalistic integrity as well… but I shan’t extrapolate that one).
telstra share holders getting a good deal? i’d like to see that…
Josh has made some very relevant observations and is pointing out that Ansearch may not be quite the “innovative and fresh” search engine they claim to be in their press releases and media interviews.
I have been following some of the forum threads mentioned by a previous poster here. The way I read it is the general public & shareholders are not aware of the issues & implications surrounding Ansearch, that is why one would see only a few ringing alarm bells about Ansearch’s activities at this stage.
I don’t see a Tall Poppy Syndrome (requires envy of success) or Slanderous activity (requires false accusations) out there, only folks that have search industry knowledge & insight on their side pointing out what they have learned about the Ansearch way of going about business and traffic acquisition.
Why anyone would call to support a company that trades off the name and goodwill of others (to mention one issue) is beyond my comprehension. Ansearch’s activities are the antithesis of the “Australian Way”. thanks for hearing me :)
OH Just checked and the top 100 keywords and web sites is now updated. How amazing it is when you see that all of the search terms involve businesses that Ansearch have sneaky domains to. Study of the Ansearch keywords is very revealing, it has little to do with real search terms & popularity. What a joke LOL