‘ju:femaiz

So there’s another young gun on the scene of the search engine. Seeing as though Google’s worth is more than General Motors and Ford motor companies combined it’s obvious there’s money to be made. Thus it is that Telstra’s prodigy child Sensis has taken to the search engine game in its quest to own the Australian search market - phone numbers (through being ‘given’ our numbers by Telstra when created from the Yellow Pages and the White Pages).

So I decided to have a look at how it compares on a couple of sites I’ve worked on.

Waterhog Pty Ltd

I worked on Waterhog for Sally Dominguez last year. One of the key challenges was an existing company called “waterhog” that provided a matting product under that name (thus causing no interference with the naming of Sally’s product). A key concern was rankings in the various search engines - especially under Australian searches. Through a great document structure we were easily able to achieve near top rankings on Google worldwide (#2), Google Australia (non-Australian only search - #1), MSN Search (Site #2, Page #3), Yahoo Search (Page #7), Yahoo Australia (#1).

I then looked at how we go on the new search engine. Under an “everything search” we don’t even hit the first page. Instead we are continually beaten by our ‘matting’ friends from the US. Restricting it only to web pages yields no better results with mining companies somehow being higher up on the list than the Australian company with the name of the search. Given that the other sites yield results in the same region (high rankings for waterhog) I’m quite suprised at how poorly sensis performs. I wonder how their datamining engine has been created and what it searches for.

The Music Lounge

The Music Lounge has been a harder one to move up the rankings. This has been due to the generic nature of the business name, though it has moved (albeit slowly) through google’s rankings. When it debuted it was nowhere on google. Now it’s moved up to #3 on an australian google search though it’s still nowhere to be seen on the main google page. Yahoo has it at number eight on a generic search and number four on an australian search and just scrapes in on msn’s international search.

Applying a sensis search, however, yields nothing for the full search and nothing for the world wide web only search. Yet another strike against the new engine.

Sally Dominguez

Although only a skeletal splash with a testing page for some interesting DOM based interactive components, the site again has a great document model. This yields great:

• Google International (#3);
• Google International/AU (#2);
• Google AU (#3);
• Yahoo (#2);
• MSN (#1); and finally
• Sensis fails

I plan to update this in a month to see if there’s been any change (from their end)… Until then, I’d suggest steering clear of sensis - even though it claims to be the ‘australian’ search engine…