New Irish Search Engine Launched

Mike Russen is a man with a mission. An electronic engineer by trade he has worked in many diverse and interesting jobs. And now he has something new to occupy his time. Mike has launch a dedicated Irish search engine called Search The Owl (http://www.searchtheowl.com). This ambitious project has already attracted a lot of interest and with over 16,000 websites indexed it is going from strength to strength. OMNI managed to get some interview time with Mike and here is what he had to say:

1.     Mike, can you tell us briefly how Search The Owl came about.

Search The Owl came about mainly because I felt that there was a gap in the market for a local, dedicated search engine.  I was fed up with going to directories trying to find local information and the directories did not seem to be updated regularly and there were a lot of  "dead links". With The Owl and the way we spider the internet, the spider only picks up "live links". If a site is down or on error the spider will recognize this and drop the site.

2.     It is a crawler engine not a directory?

Yes, we crawl the internet in much the same way as Google. Sites need to be titled properly etc. as I cannot determine where in the index any particular site will appear. It' has been an eye opener for me as to how many sites are not optimised or titled properly. I made some free meta tag software for users to download from our optimisation page.  

3.     What is your catchment area for the service?

All the counties of Ireland and any sites with Irish related content from anywhere in the world.

4.   How does one of my readers go about getting in to the engine?

If they send an email to mike@searchtheowl.com with the URL (we only need the index page) I will ensure that the site is inserted for spidering and the site will appear at 9 am the following day when The Owl updates itself.

5.   Do you intend to charge an inclusion fee or operate a placement service in the future?

We do have an advert system whereby a customer can pay to have their site appear on all search pages no matter what search term is used, I am not really sure, I have been looking at the "Pay Per Click" that the really big sites use. 

6.   What are your traffic numbers like – impressions, users, searches etc?

For a site that has just started we are pleased with the hit rate. For April 2005 we had 2704 searches for a 30 day period which works out at an average of  90.13 searches per day. We have had hits from 29 countries, the highest percentage from Ireland and the UK next.

7. You mention on the site that you use a spider robot – what is it called so our readers can recognize it?

It should appear in stats as "seb spider"

8. Do you have a submission guidelines or do you index all websites?

Only that they are family friendly and have Irish content. As said previously I do not want to act as any sort of censor. It's actually quite intensive looking at all sites that are indexed but in our database files we can search for certain keywords and delete them before the site updates. I wanted to try and keep things relevant to Ireland. With Google if you put in the search term “Ireland” 178,000,000 sites come up and a lot of them have no Irish content at all. Whilst Google is a fantastic resource I think that it has become more of an information institution rather than what it started out as, a search engine if that makes any sense.

9. Finally, Mike, can you tell me where the name came from?

The idea of The Owl came about by the phrase "wise old owl" , we also thought of searchtheelephant as they apparently do not forget things but the name is a bit long. All the names that are exclamations like "eureka", "yahoo" are long gone so we just stuck with "searchtheowl".

Comments

[Roger]

Hi Fergal,

Just to let you know about another new Irish Search Engine built by us:
Scrudu.ie

Regards,
Roger

[Roger]

Isn't this a bit ironic then:
http://www.iedr.ie/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?whois=websiteexperts.ie
- IEDR Domain info for the modestly named websiteexperts.ie.

[Hugh]

Well I too received the spam from these fantastic people. Google.ie is a great local engine, and sites like Search.ie are fantastic too so theres no need for a 'spider' like this. Especially one which 'spams', giving the industry as a whole - and the people in it who who what they're talking about - a bad name.

[Mike]

Yawn

[Michele]

You sent unsolicited bulk email not only to us, but also to a number of our clients. Does google email you every time they spider your site? No. Of course not.
Do any of the other serious search engines? No
You should really learn something about how the 'net works before you try preaching to those of us who do
Also, if you want to run a search engine then you should at least get some proper software behind it.
With regard to email:
http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html

[Mike]

With greatest respect to Mr Michele Neylon who is the MD of Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd. - This is the only company that has complained about receiving an email informing him that his site and company had been indexed in The Owl. Since his company spends cash on advertising with Google you would think that a free advert/link would be of some benefit to his business.

[Michele]

He fails to mention that he has been spamming people indiscrimately.