Hi there. First off I woudl like to introduce myself. My name is Alistair McIntyre and I own and operate www.ukwizz.com It is a fairly new Uk based search engine. The engine is aproximatly 6 months old, so is very much still building it's database. We crawl all our own data, no feeds etc, we also use no adverts, sponsored listings or any other distraction. Just pure search results. I could sure use your feedback UKWizz.
Hey man, how are you? We talked at an un-named forum before, I will not name it because I do not like to promote other forums on Digital Point. But I hope you are progressing, we are here to help and hope you will help us. Welcome to Digital Point, maybe you should do an introduction thread on yourself and your background also, look you will get a 2 for the price of 1 deal at DP!!!!
And what's its Unique Selling Points? I appreciate your efforts but why would you even try and compete with Google, Yahoo, MSN and many others? Your technology doesn't seem cutting edge. I tried a few terms and got some medicore to poor results to be honest. And if you aren't going to make a penny of it.... What's the point? It does look very good design-wise. It seems to work functionality-wise and it's pretty fast so well done for all that. But unless you explain your motivations and goals a bit more, i really can not see the point.
It is just a start up TOPS, he is a UK only SE, he is doing his own spidering and that may be why you have not found a lot of results on your terms since it is a UK ONLY engine. He will be able to add advertising and affiliate programs to the engine when traffic is built.
Have you thought of partnering with Mirago to try and provide some more results to the site? You'd also get paid if the sites are clicked on (Overture style).
AC, Then why would people use this instead of ticking the 'UK Only' box on Google? Will anything be developed to even get near Google and other's relevancy of results for queries processed? At the moment it seems like it lists all pages with the term on it, in no apparent order. Just trying to be critical and give some feedback. The product is very nice but the service is overshadowed by others. You have to be first, or different. Definitely not first and only different in negative ways at the moment. Alistair did a great job in making the spider, the index and the functionality but I just don't see how this is going to work out if it doesn't have any added value over others.
That is why he is here to get your input, I am not trying to discourage it, but to give you additional insight into what he is doing.
[reply to off-topic] absolutely..its getting on my nerves I got some people to klik on a few towns (all the catagories)...to see if adsense would trigger a re-read, and it hasn't yet. That was about 3 days ago. Is annoying as the CTR would be greatly increased if the ads were at least 'on topic'. More recent news ( if you can help)..48hrs ago I put a 500+ link sitemap on the home page to help google along (scroll down on Home page)...google has re-cached that page already,which is great, but still didn't seem to crawl any deeper..it goes from one headache to another.
wow thanks for the replies guys, A few of you have asked about how it makes money, it doesnt, that wasn't my intention from the start. To be honest I don't intend to make any money directly from users. The database is still very small when compared to the larger search engines, like was said, who can possible compete with the likes of Google. The overall aim is to run it like a nich search engine, admitadly the UK is a very large niche but the princaples are still the same. This is where is is currently hosted from http://www.ukwizz.com/servers.jpg UKWizz.
Hi and welcome. Nice design Q1 as you do / intend to crawl how will or do you handle subdomains? M PS you also may want to put in a visual submit control - otherwise you may be s^^^ed
Hi expat. Sub domains are handled in the saw way regular domains are. In effect they are classed as their own site. UKWizz
Great -I think that is how they should be used not as extensions to existing sites only if this is indicated via links. M
your directory doesnt have a category for music sites i tried adding mine, i did add my domain to the search engine though nice site
I added my url for our UK domain to be spidered. I did not add anything to the directory since the links are redirects. If the links were true anchor text links, I would have been glad to get listed in the directory. Good luck, it looks clean and simple.
Yep the directory links to go through a cgi app to count clicks etc. To be honest though, the directory is just somewhere people can browse for sites of interest. The only main benefit of direct links is PR. Thats not what it's about. UKWizz
To expect siteowners to find a matching cat submit by hand and than not even give a straight link in exchange in my book is cheating on the non technicals as anyone knowing about these issues will not submit. Thus a directory based on such old technology in my opinion is doomed or simply serves a site a linkfarm and thus should be avoided like hell. It will also do more or less nothing to support any case behind it as SE's are waking up (and I hope kill all these) to the fact that collection directories are pretty useless in terms of straight SE results where the user is actually looking to find a real site not a maze of link farm equivalents. M