Rob Stokes over at Quirk beat me to my own scoop this morning - the nerve!
When Google launched their new Co-op program last month it captured our imagination! South Africa’s best search engine is the local Google.co.za, with all the others coming a distant second (based on the fact that Google is the #1 accessed site in the country). So we decided to use Google Co-Op to create a better search engine - the power of Google Search combined with local knowledge of the Internet world should lead to substantially better results.
Google Co-Op allows you to create a custom search engine which either prioritizes or only searches a designated set of pre-determined results. You can add additional refinements and as time goes on, I am sure that they will offer additional features to the product set. We are looking to the South African community to assist us in improving the results by adding the good sites, and removing the poor ones - something that is automated for Google, but will be manual for us - human intervention is a great way to detect poor spam sites, etc.
Lee Stuttaford & Keith Feldwick-Davis from incuBeta are responsible for the design & development of Sekamo - and they’ve done a great job.
The beauty of Google Co-Op is that it allows hundreds of people to team together to improve the listings by adding their favourite sites, relevant to the topic in question (in this case, South African interest). Anyone can sign up on the site, and you just need a Gmail account to get started (email me at vlingham-at-gmail.com if you need one), and start contributing the development of our local search engine.
This is true collaboration around Search - Google understands, and I agree, that search has to verticalize over the next few years - Google.com simply will not be able to improve the quality of the information without hundreds and thousands of sites like Sekamo that will feed better information into them, based upon actual user relevance and collaborator input.
I’m pretty impressed with Google, however, they have restricted the site to 5000 refinements (i.e. we cannot load more then 5000 additional sites into the index for prioritisation) - hopefully this will change soon.
So I invite all South Africans who are interested in creating a better search engine locally, to either volunteer or submit site for prioritisation in our index.
Oh, and keep this watching this space - if Sekamo takes off, you can expect us to launch many more vertical search engines!
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Comments On This Post
November 6, 2006 at 8:36 am
Check the usual keyphrases some of our sites usually rank highly for on Google.co.za, & its no there hmmm
November 6, 2006 at 9:59 am
Hey Rafiq - you’re approved as a contributor to Sekamo now - I’ve also added your blog into the index - check your rankings now… We don’t control the rankings, just which sites get prioritized as more or less relevant to South Africans…
November 6, 2006 at 10:28 am
and me?
November 6, 2006 at 10:36 am
Check the usual keyphrases some of our sites usually rank highly for on Google.co.za, & its no there hmmm
November 6, 2006 at 11:59 am
Hey Rafiq - you’re approved as a contributor to Sekamo now - I’ve also added your blog into the index - check your rankings now… We don’t control the rankings, just which sites get prioritized as more or less relevant to South Africans…
November 6, 2006 at 12:28 pm
and me?
November 7, 2006 at 6:08 am
Vinny:
You should invite the Product Manager for this product - Shashi Seth to join in too. Maybe he can help with South African wines. He has a blog called grapejooz.blogspot.com where he writes about wines. Better still do an interview with him - I hear his e-mail is shashis@google.com
That would be supercool
Robby
November 7, 2006 at 7:28 am
Thanks Robby - already emailed him - I’m working on it.
November 7, 2006 at 8:08 am
Vinny:
You should invite the Product Manager for this product - Shashi Seth to join in too. Maybe he can help with South African wines. He has a blog called grapejooz.blogspot.com where he writes about wines. Better still do an interview with him - I hear his e-mail is shashis@google.com
That would be supercool
Robby
November 7, 2006 at 9:28 am
Thanks Robby - already emailed him - I’m working on it.
November 7, 2006 at 6:03 pm
[...] A geek Lunch without any of allergy symptoms spotted. If you are wondering what Vinny’s allergy is or have any advice on how to fix his allergy problem click on the image. If you cant see the image you’re probably reading this on another site, try clicking here to see a bigger pic of Vinny Lingham. If you’ve read this far have a look at Vinny Lingham’s Sekamo Search Engine powered by Google co-op. [...]
November 7, 2006 at 7:12 pm
[...] More on Sekamo Filed under: Internet | [...]
November 7, 2006 at 10:24 pm
Be sure to post your mission on Revenue Source I tend to see quite a few affiliate marketers from African regions who would probably assist you in spreading the word about Sekamo.
November 8, 2006 at 12:24 am
Be sure to post your mission on Revenue Source I tend to see quite a few affiliate marketers from African regions who would probably assist you in spreading the word about Sekamo.
November 13, 2006 at 2:57 pm
[...] | Exclusive Interview with Shashi Seth - Product Manager for Google Co-Op Thanks to the comments of one my readers on the post about Sekamo.co.za, (which is beingexpanded right now from a Google Co-Op Engine, to include Social Network aspects, courtesy of Ning) , I was able to track down Shashi Seth, the product manager for Google Co-Op, who was willing to be interviewed for this blog, as follows: Vinny: Google Co-Op allows individuals and companies to construct custom search engines using the Google infrastructure, including advertising & search algorithms. Why has Google made this multi billion dollar technology available to the average man on the street? [...]
January 25, 2007 at 2:28 am
It sure is a nice service google give us. I also made a nice simple coop but i also added some feeds to it.
So Photosearchr is a great way to find news and search fast for information about photo and digital editing..
January 25, 2007 at 4:28 am
It sure is a nice service google give us. I also made a nice simple coop but i also added some feeds to it.
So Photosearchr is a great way to find news and search fast for information about photo and digital editing..
June 20, 2008 at 6:36 am
Hi Vinny !!
Alliance IT & Business Solutions situated in Durban is focussed on producing local sources of info. We have a launced a few websites viz
http://www.samotoring.co.za
http://www.wozaafrica.com
http://www.ethekwiniproperty.com
http://www.2010goals.com
http://www.bondinfo.co.za
We are in the process of launching more sites and have about 30 attarctive domain names registered.
We need an investor to expand and help develop our enterprise.
Can you suggest any companies that we can contact.
June 20, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Hi Vinny !!
Alliance IT & Business Solutions situated in Durban is focussed on producing local sources of info. We have a launced a few websites viz
http://www.samotoring.co.za
http://www.wozaafrica.com
http://www.ethekwiniproperty.com
http://www.2010goals.com
http://www.bondinfo.co.za
We are in the process of launching more sites and have about 30 attarctive domain names registered.
We need an investor to expand and help develop our enterprise.
Can you suggest any companies that we can contact.
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