Something exciting in the Australian search space?

29 Aug 2005

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.