Irish Search Engine

m1racle

Hey guys,

I'm working on a .ie search engine, index is still pretty messy but we're working on it. Just hoping to get feedback/criticism/suggestions let me know what you all think so far.

http://www.miracle.ie

Not sure if direct link is allowed, mods remove if not thanks.

Optimus Prime

my website didnt come up and a few others i tried!

m1racle

What's the name of your site and I'll add it now? We're still building the index, hoping that submissions will make up a big part of it.

ronivek

If I want to search within the .ie domain I can simply do a Google search for "blah site:.ie".

Is there something novel you guys are doing that's not obvious from the site? Not to be overly harsh but at the moment it's basically a hugely inferior Google which only indexes a tiny proportion of content which an Irish person might be interested in.

m1racle

Generally people don't know those shortcuts google provide(site:.ie) and because our index will be human edited we hope to provide better results for things like tradesmen, blogs etc. and minimum amount of spam.

Thanks for reply ronivek I know it's a bit late to be looking for a crit!

Tom1991

doogle i believe has it sown up

trotter_inc

Basic question but why would anyone want to use this when Google offers an option to search 'pages from Ireland'?

The 'Miracle' logo on your main page looks a like amateur in my opinion. Also, I would change the font type in the search text box.

Also, the alignment on your addsite.html page needs to be fixed.

Apologies that they're all improvement suggestions...but you did ask

Good luck with it!

m1racle

'pages from Ireland' throws up anything hosted in Ireland which usually includes a lot of spam or just useless stuff. For example if I'm an electrician and I pay someone to set me up a 6-10 page site it will be practically ignored in major search engines and people searching for an electrician will be offered things like Jobs websites or newspaper articles because these sites are rated better.

The miracle logo is temporary I just needed the general look and image dimensions while testing the site. Alignment will be fixed on addsite.html

I think we are overly reliant on Google, why do people use sites like yourlocal or irishblogs? Because they provide more relevant results and you find what you want faster than if you had used Google.

Thanks for advice trotter it's appreciated.

mark renton

I like the layout, the format is necessarily simple, one of the reasons doogle engine outshines Yooha is that doogle page remains simple with no distractions, surfers are easily distracted people

one small thing i would change is that the first return is half way down the page, i would move it up to begin probably quater way down the page, i think the descriptive font could be smaller

nice work - all the best

Evil Phil

This is really a design question so I'm moving it over there.

PDelux

Yes i think we're overly reliant on Google too and it's being annoying me recently that most of the results i get are companies trying to sell stuff. Its too commercial. There's probably some setting to avoid that but its not obvious and if it's not obvious to the user then its a bad design.

steve-hosting36

Are you searching the .ie namespace or all irish sites?

Gordon

The front page suggests some popular searches and the first link is 'horoscopes'. I clicked that and got girls.ie which doesn't load. The second result was the Irish Independent site and I couldn't find any mention of horoscopes on that page.

m1racle

@steve-hosting36 - Our goal is to index every site that uses a .ie domain, so things like youtube.ie are included even though it redirects to a .com. We don't include irish sites that are exclusively on .com.

@Gordon - Thanks for pointing that out I randomly picked those words from previously searched terms. Irish Independent owns a few domains that redirect to pages on their main site. As we improve the index our results will get better.

aidan_walsh

We don't include irish sites that are exclusively on .com.

Why not?

m1racle

People who choose to use .com exclusively generally seek a worldwide audience, by only searching .ie we display results that for the most part are aimed at Irish people. We also promote the use of the .ie extension.

By working on this project I have found many interesting sites that otherwise would have been buried in bigger search engines results. I thought for a long time that Ireland didn't have much to offer in terms of content but it turns out there's plenty there we just don't have an efficient way of finding it.

jmcc

m1racle wrote: »

People who choose to use .com exclusively generally seek a worldwide audience,

Not necessarily. There is still a large number of Irish .com websites that use .com as their primary brand even though they are targeting Ireland. Some even use .net (Eircom.net being an example).

Regards...jmcc

dory

I have two sites one is .com the other .org, and we have an almost exclusively Irish audience.
I googled the names of my sites and absolutely nothing came up. And they're both words not a name I made up.

m1racle

@jmcc - Of course I was just speaking generally. Right now we index just .ie and I think by doing this we can have a well managed index of sites and a website that delivers relevant results. I believe including every .com, .net etc. that claims an interest in Ireland could lead to an index that at present is unmanageable. Maybe in the future we will add this feature but for now we are focused on .ie.

@dory - Are you sure google has indexed your sites? On bigger search engines sometimes it just comes down to who spent more on SEO services. With an almost exclusively Irish audience you should consider using .ie for your sites.


I think a lot of people overlook use of .ie simply because it costs more, we should be making use of our ccTLD. In my opinion Irish content is always being overshadowed by American sites. I think it's a shame to see good relevant sites being ignored in the major search engines.

Dawei

I searched the term "kung fu in Dublin", and nothing came up that even has the term kung fu in it only Dublin.

I don't know if this is me but recently I see google show the local websites first before others, even if the name of the place is not included in the search, and I am sure there are a lot of sites using .com, .net etc for their irish sites.

m1racle

The search engine is still being developed it is by no means a finished website. As we progress more sites will be added and results will improve.

Some people do prefer to use .com, JMCC runs hosterstats.com and has said there is still a large number of Irish .com websites I trust he knows what he's talking about but this is something we will look at in the future.

Right now we want to show people there is far more available on .ie than they may have initially thought.

_ZeeK_

new websites are being created at a phenomenal rate each day.
if you have to manually create a database / rely too heavily on submissions, I can't see it keeping track.
to be truly effective, you'd need to create some spider / trawler software.

m1racle

Hey _ZeeK_ we do have a crawler behind our site and we can find many sites using it.

The problem is some people create sites and think people will just find them. Without link structures the crawler cant find a site thats just sitting on a server somewhere, that's where we need submissions.

When this project started I asked the IEDR could I have access to their records to build the index but they said this was not possible. It's a shame really as the information I was requesting is available through their whois. I think what we're doing could really promote the .ie extension and therefore benefit the IEDR but we'll have to continue without their records.

RoadKillTs

hoping that submissions will make up a big part of it.

That's not going to work imo.

trotter_inc

m1racle wrote: »

The search engine is still being developed it is by no means a finished website.

Should you really have the site live if it's not performing to it's best ability yet? From an end user point of view, if someone comes across your site and they don't get the expected behaviour, the chances are that they won't return to the site again as their intial impression was bad.

steve-hosting36

If it's .ie whois data you want - talk to jmcc!

jmcc

steve-hosting36 wrote: »

If it's .ie whois data you want - talk to jmcc!

I don't provide .ie whois data, Steve,
I only deal with domain statistics. But in terms of the Irish domain footprint on the net, it is over 262K domains and probably 10 to 15% more are hosted on non-Irish hosters. Approximately 200 new Irish domains are registered a day but not all of them are used for websites or e-mail.

Regards...jmcc

steve-hosting36

Perhaps you could license http://whoisireland.com/ to these guys John

jmcc

m1racle wrote: »

Some people do prefer to use .com, JMCC runs hosterstats.com and has said there is still a large number of Irish .com websites I trust he knows what he's talking about but this is something we will look at in the future.

To put the Irish domain footprint into some kind of perspective, the 01 January 2010 figures are:
.ie: 135904
.com: 111725
.net: 12733
.org: 7193
.biz: 2273
.info: 2841
.mobi: 812
.asia: 53

There's also another 18k or so .eu and .co.uk domains.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

steve-hosting36 wrote: »

Perhaps you could license http://whoisireland.com/ to these guys John

No. I could not Steve,
But I could add all the gTLD data to it as the .ie records have been frozen since 2003 and are purely historical. The whole "what is an Irish website?" question is the kind of work I did a long time ago. The web was quite different then and most Irish websites were hosted outside of Ireland so it meant mapping the entire com/net/org/biz/info space and basically running cryptographic algorithms to detect Irish sites. I managed to get the algorithms running at aobut 94% efficiency but the costs (and time) required to do the mapping what was essentially the core of the web were too high to do on a regular basis without serious financial backing.

Regards...jmcc

m1racle

Thanks for the info jmcc, any idea why the .ie records were frozen? It's data that's available through their whois surely they could provide access to it in bulk to people who apply in some way.

Just out of interest do you still maintain whoisireland.com? it seems to be the only Irish search engine with an extensive index.

@trotter_inc - When I talk about it with other people it's handy to just point them to the domain so they can check it out and give me feedback. I do see your point but I want to hear what people think early on so I can decide what direction we should go in.