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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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
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So Photosearchr is a great way to find news and search fast for information about photo and digital editing..
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Alliance IT & Business Solutions situated in Durban is focussed on producing local sources of info. We have a launced a few websites viz
www.samotoring.co.za
www.wozaafrica.com
www.ethekwiniproperty.com
www.2010goals.com
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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