isearch.ie gone?

jmcc

Is isearch.ie gone or down for transfer? I noticed that the site has a 'domain suspended' holding page from Digiweb at the moment.

Regards...jmcc

eoin@host.ie

It's got an "offline for maintenance" holding page now.

jmcc

Originally posted by eoin@host.ie
It's got an "offline for maintenance" holding page now.

I think that's www.iesearch.ie Eoin,
www.isearch.ie was yet another Irish search engine. The iesearch.ie site went down for maintenance about two years ago and never came back.

Regards...jmcc

eoin@host.ie

Sorry,my mistake. I have to admit that I hadn't heard of www.isearch.ie. There were a heck of a lot of similar sounding Irish search sites a couple of years ago and most of them have gone the same way as the above.

Eoin

jmcc

Originally posted by eoin@host.ie
I have to admit that I hadn't heard of www.isearch.ie. There were a heck of a lot of similar sounding Irish search sites a couple of years ago and most of them have gone the same way as the above.

Yep the scary thing is that there is a lot more dead Irish search engine websites than live ones. Many of them underestimated the work required to create and maintain a good index. Some just hadn't a chance because they did not understand the business. I don't think there is such a thing as a pure play search engine now.

Offhand, I can remember searchingirelandonly.ie, searchireland.com, searchingireland.com, irishsitesearch.com (now some owned by some Indian squatter), eirecity.com, webdirectory.ie, iedirectory.ie (published two printed directories of .ie websites and was never heard from again. Their easysearch.ie directory/SE never even got off the ground [1]), Webtrade's [insert county name]guidelive.com content-free pay for inclusion directory sites, searchingireland.com (now owned by Ultimate Search, the Hong Kong based squatters) meta-search engine, globalirish.com (which seems to have been resurrected as part of IndexIreland.com a competent and well designed US based dir/SE), and Doras.ie (now sidelined by Eircom as a waste of resources).

Competing with Google is a very tough business.

Regards...jmcc
[1] http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=819154

mneylon

It still amazes me that Doras has not been taken offline completely.
Browseireland is full of dead links and general rubbish.
What is left that is worth using?

jmcc

Originally posted by blacknight
It still amazes me that Doras has not been taken offline completely.
Browseireland is full of dead links and general rubbish.
What is left that is worth using?

Damn those rhetorical questions are hard to answer.

Browseireland's main purpose seems to be as an advertising site for House Of Ireland. Then there is niceone.com which is related to Volta (which went dot.bang last November). And of course we should not forget irishsites.com - Online.ie's inherited directory.

Doras was involved in a PFI thing a few years ago where it was trying to convince people to pay something like £100 for inclusion with its "25K" of sites reviewed. It was even sending out letters to those site owners who were listed. I guess Eircom needed the money. :> People never seemed to give a fsck about the reviews anyway.

Regards...jmcc

eoin@host.ie

Originally posted by jmcc
Offhand, I can remember

JMCC, I'm surprised at you

You've left out this ragged bunch


<http://www.2beirish.com/>
<http://www.allofireland.com>
<http://www.askpaddy.com>
<http://www.dublinpeople.com/directory/bluepages/addlisting.php>
<http://www.browseireland.com>
<http://www.finditireland.com>
<http://www.gaire.com/>
<http://www.irishsites.com/>
<http://www.ireland2go.com/>
<http://www.niceone.com>
<http://www.omalogic.co.uk>
<http://www.purplepages.ie>
<http://www.searchengine.ie>
<http://www.searcs-web.com>
<http://www.startpage.ie>
<http://swift.kerna.com>
<http://www.totalireland.com>
<http://www.irelandsno1.com/>
<http://www.irelandbusinessdirectory.ie>

jmcc

Originally posted by eoin@host.ie
JMCC, I'm surprised at you

I'm not used to this daylight thing Eoin.

You've left out this ragged bunch

Some of them are active and well maintained. Niceone.com is not dead but the red web design is a bit off putting. Still I suppose it is better red than dead. swift.kerna.com - still around but not a player. totalireland.com - front end for Indexireland.com

But the ones below seem to have, putting it diplomatically, problems.

searchengine.ie - dead

startpage.ie - never got started.
purplepages.ie - not sure if it is still going.
irelandsno1.com - a triumph of wishful thinking over reality.

Take a look at the source of http://www.irelandsno1.com/alpha/host.htm and see what host.ie was really up to according to this site. Hosting365 was also engaged in a wider range of activities - http://www.irelandsno1.com/alpha/hosting365.htm as was Eircom http://www.irelandsno1.com/alpha/eircom.htm

irelandbusinessdirectory.ie - Yellow pages must be wetting themselves.

Regards...jmcc

steve-hosting36

Originally posted by eoin@host.ie

www.it-directory.ie

Quoting your own site as an example of a dead search engine??

Ah, nicely edited Eoin

eoin@host.ie

What got me about a lot of the directories(and probably why so few of them are still around apart from our IT Directory which was always free of charge) is that they tried to charge upwards of £30 for an entry and then claimed to be "Ireland's most comprehensive directory" etc.

Eoin

eoin@host.ie

Originally posted by jmcc
[1] http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=819154

Completely off topis, I followed the link on the above link "Get the facts on Windows and Linux", http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp

What's your take on their "facts" JMCC, Blacknight?

Eoin

steve-hosting36

Originally posted by eoin@host.ie
why so few of them are still around apart from our IT DirectoryQUOTE]

http://www.it-directory.ie/Irish_Data_Centres/

Not very accurate though is it., at the end of the day, any search engine or dircetory is going to live or die on the usefulness of its data, and thats something that requires a lot of work to maintain. Throwing up a free directory script and leaving it to the four winds, does not a good search tool make, I think thats the main lesson learned from the long list of ghost sites above.

mneylon

Originally posted by eoin@host.ie
Completely off topis, I followed the link on the above link "Get the facts on Windows and Linux", http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp

What's your take on their "facts" JMCC, Blacknight?

Eoin

Any study commissioned by M$ is going to portray them in a favourable light..

mneylon

Originally posted by steve-hosting36
Not very accurate though is it.,

Not that you would know what the word "accurate" meant anyway..

jmcc

Originally posted by eoin@host.ie
What got me about a lot of the directories(and probably why so few of them are still around apart from our IT Directory which was always free of charge) is that they tried to charge upwards of £30 for an entry and then claimed to be "Ireland's most comprehensive directory" etc.

Seems that they were the either the product of dot.bomb business plans by people who did not understand the business they were getting into or some demented landgrab by people who just did not understand the search/directory business. The iedirectory.ie venture seemed to be a good example of the former. The [insert county name]guidelive.com sites were a classic example of the latter. But more importantly there was a massive shift (over the last seven years) in how people navigate the web. People now navigate by search engine rather than by directory.

PFI is good if the traffic and the positioning can justify it. However with a site that only gets a few hundred page impressions a month, it had better have a PR of 11 to warrant paying for inclusion.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Originally posted by steve-hosting36
at the end of the day, any search engine or dircetory is going to live or die on the usefulness of its data, and thats something that requires a lot of work to maintain.

This is perhaps one of the lessons that many of the Irish search engines learned the hard way. Most of them were based on static lists of websites and had no acquisition strategy. (Unlike WhoisIreland.com ) Relying on user submissions will only get subs from users who actually are aware of the site. It is a Catch 22 situation. However with .ie domains increasing at the rate of 20-40 a day and .com/net/org/info/biz going up by at least three times that, tracking new sites is difficult and deciding what is worth spidering takes time. With so many sites having 'coming soon' holding pages it is very easy to put an SE index together with very little actual content. Then there are the bloody clone sites.

Niche directories such as it-directory.ie are good in terms of content and this allows them to compete successfully with the bigger non-specialised directories. But all directories have to be checked periodically so that they don't end like Dmoz.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Originally posted by eoin@host.ie
Completely off topis, I followed the link on the above link "Get the facts on Windows and Linux", http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp

What's your take on their "facts" JMCC, Blacknight?

You pay your money and you get the results you want. In this case, Microsoft got exactly what it wanted. Some apps require Windows and some run better on Linux but it is all too easy to skew the criteria to make one appear better than the other. However I would have the same level of confidence in any document from these 'consultancies' as I would in a press release.

Regards...jmcc

Terminator

Directories are like huge trawling nets that catch a lot of visitors who would never have found your site otherwise.

If you have a directory of 10000 listed sites and every site in that directory has its own unique individually titled page you're going to get a lot of visitors.

Traffic magnets I tell ya.

steve-hosting36

Originally posted by blacknight
Not that you would know what the word "accurate" meant anyway..

Grow up Michele.

yellum

You guys already got one web forum closed, going for broke are we ?

tom-thebox

tut tut.

jmcc

Originally posted by Terminator
If you have a directory of 10000 listed sites and every site in that directory has its own unique individually titled page you're going to get a lot of visitors.

Yep but with over 80K webpages, the housekeeping functions (detecting and deleting dead site) can take some time. I've been working on a UK version but currently that has over 1.9 Million webpages dealing with UK domains and websites and a fscking big UK only search engine. However bandwidth continues to frustrate my plans for world domination. Well that and Google, Yahoo and Microsoft really.

Regards...jmcc

mneylon

Maintaining any directory is time-consuming. Dead links are always a problem.
For example, on search.ie, we nuked the entire DB of dead links about 2 months ago and got rid of a lot of deadwood. Unfortunately there is no easy way to differentiate between a holding page / cybersquat and a real link...

jmcc

Originally posted by blacknight
Unfortunately there is no easy way to differentiate between a holding page / cybersquat and a real link...

It is not easy but holding pages have their own characteristics as do cybersquatting pages. It is possible to generate a deepsix list of cybersquatting scum and then drop everything remotely connected with that list. But this goes far beyond what a typical directory does in terms of resources and programming. Holding pages are a lot easier to handle.

Regards...jmcc

mneylon

Originally posted by jmcc
It is not easy but holding pages have their own characteristics as do cybersquatting pages. It is possible to generate a deepsix list of cybersquatting scum and then drop everything remotely connected with that list. But this goes far beyond what a typical directory does in terms of resources and programming. Holding pages are a lot easier to handle.

Regards...jmcc

Not an easy task. A lot would depend on what kind of backend you are using etc.,