Well, they still haven’t cottoned onto the sematic web thing (perhaps because they’re not trying to get indexed by anyone else!), but Australian engines keep popping up. Of late, we’ve seen an aggressive marketing campaign from Telstra-owned Sensis Group, both for their own general purpose search engine, Sensis.com.au, and for their subsidiary Yellow Pages directory.
In fact, so prolific is this campaign that the two often collide in spectacular style, as I discovered on my (prolonged, courtesy of the Cross City Tunnel stupidity that gripped Sydney today) bus trip into the city this morning.
It wouldn’t have been so tragic if their campaigns weren’t so similar… but they are. The only difference, apparently, is the strength of execution: note the SMS components of each campaign vary slightly, with Sensis using a regular number (presumably to add unsuspecting commuters email addresses and phone numbers to a database for on-selling) whilst the Yellow Pages have at least gone to the trouble of acquiring a dedicated promotional number.
As a side note, their index is heavily commercially geared, and seems to leverage “Australian” results purely on the basis of domain namespace (that is, .au). As a developer, I’m not terribly impressed with it, but, unlike Ansearch, this is a force that may have to be taken seriously into consideration in the months and years to come.
Wow — suddenly your blog has become so image-heavy!
You take good photos, though. Ever consider an image management site — something like Flickr?
No, not really… mostly just because I don’t like the idea of not being able to backup/bail out my data quickly/easily. That, images here are all linked to posts, which I can search (courtesy of ALT attributes) and then find with relative ease.
I think that categorising by year, month as I do would be counterproductive, but for the fact that all images I categorise in this way are linked to posts (and the posts have a chronology, but, more importantly, are searchable).
I probably should be using Photostack more, but it’s too much work for me at the minute to update the design, etc., and Ben’sown image management software is what I’m planning on eventually getting around to using (eventually!) for album-based stuff.
Oh and I keep source images of everything locally in a folder system, anyway — and I know I could have that with Flickr, too, but I just find firing up an FTP client and quickly throwing some files across (or using WordPress’ web-based upload feature, if there’s just one file) far quicker than signing into a 3rd party site, uploading (and adjusting whatever settings are involved — If I’m publishing something, I’ve already spent a while making sure it’s the right size, etc!), then getting its URL and including that in the post.
The other thing is, even if Flickr doesn’t shut down, if they ever change their image URI structure then posts dependent upon Flickr break. Further, hosting images remotely results in another DNS query — which is an issue I’m particularly sensitive to, given how often my ISP’s DNS server is painfully slow.
Edit: Quite by accident, I discovered a case in point here.
Hi Josh,
My name is Dean Jones and I am the CEO of Ansearch.
Picked up on your post earlier today via Technorati and thought you and your readers may want to learn more about the merits of our SE and how we are approaching the Australian marketplace.
Email me and I will answer as best I can any questions you have on our operations… or accept feedback/comments on constructive critisism on how we may do things better.
BTW… Much has changed since your first article on us some 6 months ago. Might be worth taking another look…
Rgs,
DJ.
I’ve replied to Dean Jones by (a rather lengthy) email, and plan on publishing a follow-up article discussing Ansearch in light of the events and changes that have taken place in recent months.