Irish Search Engines/Directories

mneylon

Simple question really. Which Irish search engines and directories do you use?
I know a lot of people use Google, but I am referring to Irish specific sites.

dahamsta

None of 'em, they're all rubbish. Google with site:ie is good enough for me.

adam

peterd

ditto dahamsta. If I was looking for flowers, I'd just go looking in Google for "Flowers Ireland" or something like that. If you're looking for a site, chances are it's on Google anyway. The Irish Search Engines just aren't big enough for my liking. At a push though, I'd use Browse Ireland .

Also, since we're on the webmaster's board, I list most of my sites in all the Irish search engines, but all of them together do not even come close to the traffic coming from google or yahoo.

jmcc

Originally posted by dahamsta
None of 'em, they're all rubbish. Google with site:ie is good enough for me.

Kind of limits the results to just the 18K active Irish domains doesn't it? It also ignores the thousands of websites on Esat and Eircom and the tens of thousands of Irish sites in the .com/.net/.org (CNO) domains.

In terms of Irish sites, very few of the big international engines are any good. This is primarily because their dataset is not country precise. It is very difficult to accurately target a particular country. [1] The simple way out is to just limit the search (as in Adam's example) to the national domain of the country. Given the Fine Gael like employment of Irish websites under the .ie tld, this is not a good thing. More Irish sites exist under the CNO extensions than under the .ie extension.

In no particular order:

www.indexireland.com
www.niceone.com
www.irishsearch.net
www.iesearch.ie
www.browseireland.com
www.whoisireland.com

I guess I am a bit luckier in this respect than most as I have direct access to one of the biggest Irish sites engines so I don't generally use many of the above. It is not public yet due to the fscking delay in installing a 128K leased line ordered in April.

The other problem with putting up an Irish search engine/directory is that you see people coming in and mining the whole thing. I've seen a few attempts from an Indigo dialup in Dublin to download all 50K pages on whoisireland.com with the result I had to deepsix a whole Indigo class C.

Just on the Google side of things, Google, Altavista, AllTheWeb.com, Inktomi downloads the whoisireland.com pages about once a month it also does the same for many other Irish sites so in effect Google is relying on Irish sites for data about Irish domains, especially when there is no actual website for the domain in question.

I haven't run a CNO:IE correlation recently to check how many .ie sites have their equivalent CNO domains but it was below 10% the last time I ran it.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot: Doras - a waste of space.

Regards...jmcc
[1] This is exactly what this new search engine I was working on does but it is really just a byproduct of some other work I was doing for NSA. (the other NSA - not *the* NSA).

mneylon

It is an unfortunate fact that:
1. A lot of .ie domains don't have websites
2. More people use .com's than .ie's

Google does provide a lot of Irish sites in its index, but it isn't country specific.
Doras? Does anybody actually use it? Since they introduced a paid submission model I have kept away from it, but was wondering how many people have actually 'coughed up' the fee. None of the other Irish indices charge for standard submission, though a few do for highlighted results.

dahamsta

[Yes John, it doesn't include Irish sites on CNO or other TLD's, but it's still a damn sight (fnaar) better than the Irish engines. As you know yourself, the simple rule of thumb is that you can either: a) run an engine restricted to IE, with minimal overheads; b) run an engine restricted to Irish sites, with huge overheads (staff to monitor the sites are in fact Irish); or c) run a site /allegedly/ restricted to Irish sites and hope for the best. The only one that will work technically is b), and that's not financially viable.]

1. A lot of .ie domains don't have websites

This is down to education mainly, or more accurately advocacy@ the Internet isn't being marketed as an effective business tool correctly in Ireland. On top of that, there's the cost of connectivity, which is a major factor; and the scam factor that comes from all the photocopier salesmen of the eighties moving into the web development business in the nineties. Businesses are afraid to set up on the web in Ireland for the same reason that consumers are afraid to get broadband in the US: too many people got scammed, and now the market is suffering for it.

2. More people use .com's than .ie's

This is almost entirely down to the pricing and obfuscation of registering an IE domain name.

adam

jmcc

Originally posted by dahamsta
[Yes John, it doesn't include Irish sites on CNO or other TLD's, but it's still a damn sight (fnaar) better than the Irish engines.

Blasphemy, Adam. Then again how can a mere P133 compete against the might of Google? [1]

As you know yourself, the simple rule of thumb is that you can either: a) run an engine restricted to IE, with minimal overheads; b) run an engine restricted to Irish sites, with huge overheads (staff to monitor the sites are in fact Irish); or c) run a site /allegedly/ restricted to Irish sites and hope for the best. The only one that will work technically is b), and that's not financially viable.]

Yep I'd agree with most points here. The automation process for the .ie websites is fairly clean. Point B however is not entirely accurate as that one is the Doras approach (otherwise known as the Shakespeare option [2]).

It is possible to restrict an SE to Irish sites on a somewhat limited budget if the programs are well written from a cryptographic point of view but eventually the final decision is a Human one. (I've decided that it is not a straight forward computer science problem but one that has a lot more in common with traffic analysis and linguistics.) The problem with point B is in making money. I am still trying to figure out how to make money on the SE idea and syndication seems like the best bet. The Irish SE scene is not exactly the most vibrant but much of this is down to those in Doras and its ilk [3] who created false dotbomb expectations. As for those in Esat who decided to use Google for an Irish search engine - people with room temperature IQs should not be making decisions concerning SEs.

I've also noticed that Online.ie's POS directory/SE, irishsites.com has gone .ie in the last few days. Searchengine.ie fades in and out according to the visibility of their DNS but it does not seem to be actively updated.

1. A lot of .ie domains don't have websites

This is down to education mainly, or more accurately advocacy@ the Internet isn't being marketed as an effective business tool correctly in Ireland. On top of that, there's the cost of connectivity, which is a major factor; and the scam factor that comes from all the photocopier salesmen of the eighties moving into the web development business in the nineties. Businesses are afraid to set up on the web in Ireland for the same reason that consumers are afraid to get broadband in the US: too many people got scammed, and now the market is suffering for it.

The other aspect is that companies are recovering from the hype of the dotbomb and are retrenching. Thus the high end all singing, all dancing Oracle backed jsp solution is not necessary for a five page site that hasn't been changed for 2 years.

The majority of the .ie sites that the WhoisIreland spiders (IErachnid) have checked are brochureware sites. Based on the Last-Modified data, only a few thousand have been modified in the last month or so.

2. More people use .com's than .ie's

This is almost entirely down to the pricing and obfuscation of registering an IE domain name.

There still is a significant difference between the number of CNOs being registered and the number of .ie domains being registered each month (approx 763 for April). There is almost always a net gain for CNO domains and on some months, up to a thousand Irish owned CNOs can be deleted. Deletions in the .ie space are rare and the standard line is that the domains have been so hard to get that people are reluctant to leave them go. I don't buy into this explanation. When a hosting company stops acting for a domain (hosting nameservers etc) they pull the zonefile. About 1500 .ie domains have no zonefile and are lame. This brings the number of .ies down from 28829 to about 27244.

Breaking these active domains down to domains with websites gives 20705. However only 17000 or so of those websites are active (real websites rather than a holding page on a salami box). About 7 have 127.0.0.1 as their address.

IEDR's tenure as the admin for .ie has been a history of missed opportunity and bungled implementation. The .ie namespace could have been a lot more successful if it was competently handled.

Must get some coffee as I am just awake.

Regards...jmcc
[1] Google/Altavista/Alltheweb/Inktomi use this P133 as a main reference on the .ie namespace. The P133 is only the webserver though.
[2] Old theory: If you take an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters you eventually will get all the great works including the entire output of Shakespeare. Doras proved this theory wrong.
[3] A high profile SE optimisation company lost the proper .com variant (two b's as opposed to one) of its .com earlier this year. This company had apparently promoted Doras at some Chamber of Commerce events as a good option for Irish companies. Whoya gonna call? Eh, Hong Kong! haven't RealNames gone dotbomb as well?

zAbbo

They`re not all bad

http://www.niceone.com
http://www.indexireland.com/
http://www.totalireland.com

These seem to be more listing sites than search engines but they are useful for finding Irish content sites etc.

mneylon

Originally posted by pcirl.com
They`re not all bad

http://www.niceone.com
http://www.indexireland.com/
http://www.totalireland.com

These seem to be more listing sites than search engines but they are useful for finding Irish content sites etc.

There are only a couple of actual search engines in Ireland, most are human edited directories.
There are a few advantages to the directories being human edited, but not everybody would agree with that :-)

nahdoic

http://directory.google.com/Top/Regional/Europe/Ireland/

it's got your .ie's and it's got your irish .com's ... imagine a world without google? it's just too frightening.

Victor

www.yahoo.ie (resolves to http://ie.yahoo.com/) has "Ireland only" and "UK only" filter options.

dahamsta

Originally posted by nahdoic
http://directory.google.com/Top/Regional/Europe/Ireland/

it's got your .ie's and it's got your irish .com's ... imagine a world without google? it's just too frightening.

S'not Google, it's the ODP.

Picky Adam