I have some Dutch sites. Most of my traffic comes from the Dutch MSN, Google is still almost nothing. Now I was wondering if it is still worth it to target Ilse or if this search engine has become next to irrelevant? Am also looking for some SEO advice. They are still using their own crawlers. It seems - when looking at search results - that (sub)domain names have a big influence in this search engine. Is it also still true that being listed on startpagina makes a big difference?
I run some dutch language sites as well. I get like 3 visitors a month from ilse.nl. I think it's best to focus on google. My recipe site gets like 400 uniques a day from google.be and google.nl. Startpagina's are good for the link value. If you can get on the homepage you may even get some traffic but almost all links on the homepages are paid links. I payed for a link on 2link.be, it cost me 100 euro's and it got me about 500 uniques. So it is not worth it. I could have had a lot more visitors by using adwords. Just my 2 cents. Good luck with your sites.
Don't invest in ilse.nl, for some of my dutch websites they haven't updated the index for a long time. No traffic. Invest time and money to gain rankings in google, and set up an adwords account and overture. With ppc you'll get traffic that will convert into sales. And or setup accounts with adremedy, webads, kliks, netdirect, and more.
As you can see the title this thread was about the relevance of Ilse a dutch search engine. Not about a new search engine that targets worldwide. Please use this forum to promote your search engine/directory. And don't bump threads that are old, unless you have something really new/interesting to say about the topic of the thread.