Seekport launches UK search engine

In June Seekport launched its German search engine. Now this European search engine company adds a British search site.

(December 20 2004) Seekport is a German firm developing a new search engine for the European market. The company is already testing French and German version of its technology, and has now also launched a UK search site.

Yes, this is a genuine new search engine, with its own Internet crawlers and its own index.

Fighting spam

The company makes a point out of this, arguing that they can better cope with spam focusing on European searchers.

"Our research in Germany found that nearly 60 per cent of Internet users were complaining of 'info-junk' in their search engine returns," says Hermann Havermann, Managing Director of Seekport Internet Technologies GmbH.

"With Seekport we're focused on providing our users with results that are customized to suit their specific language, market and topic requirements."

This is why the company has given local teams the responsibility of removing spam and irrelevant results. However, it remains to be seen how Seekport's four UK employees will be able to combat the global menace of spam. Without a good spam-killing search engine algorithm they will despair for sure.

Support for advanced searching

The new search engine does support simplified Boolean search terms, including - (minus) for AND NOT (exclude pages containing this keyword), keyword phrases (put within "quotation marks") and wildcards (* to replace one or more letters).

The search engine defaults to AND, meaning that all keywords in the search query have to be present for a web page to be included in the results.

There is also a page for advanced searching with a special search form that can be used for building more complex queries.

This advanced search form actually generates "grammatically correct" search queries and present them in the search form for further refinement. This means that you by using the menu based system can actually can learn how to write advanced search queries directly into the regular search forms.

To give one example: The search form allows for an "OR" search, meaning that you can put up a list of synonyms that may -- or may not -- be present on the relevant web pages.

If you do this, the search form on the search results pages will render your search query in simplified Boolean, like this: (keyword1 | keyword2) The | sign -- representing OR --- is useful when you are searching for something with many possible descriptions.

The advanced search form also lets you limit your search to specific domains or the title field of pages (equals the following syntax uri:www.pandia.com), or you may search for pages linking to a specific site (equals +link:www.pandia.com/)

Revenue is generated by pay per click text ads delivered by Espotting.

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