On 19 March 2008, I reported at Wassup Blog, one day after Rednano.sg was first launched that it had 1 page indexed and I captured the screenshot just 25 minutes after Google crawled the Rednano homepage.

Google Indexing is Fast

Today, 15 April 2008, less than 4 weeks after Google first indexed Rednano.sg, it has indexed more than 50,000 pages of Rednano.sg.

I have this feeling that Google engineers know more about Rednano.sg than the people at SPH Search.

Now, that we know Google can index a large Web site with ten of thousand of pages very quickly, you must be wondering…

So what did Rednano.sg do to enable fast Google Indexing?

For Google to index the page, it will to know the URL to crawl the page. For a search engine like Rednano.sg, the results will only be displayed when a user enter a query. However, Googlebot does not interact with the query box to get the result pages like a human visitor.

So Rednano.sg has to provide Googlebot the URL (permalink in blog lingo) to its result pages, URLs such as this:

http://www.rednano.sg/sfe/dir.action?querystring=YA+KUN+KAYA+TOAST

I reckon SPH Search will be happy to have Google indexed all of its directory listing and help to drive traffic to the new directory.

In order to do that, Rednano.sg has this page called Site Feature which provides the URLs to it’s inner pages:

http://www.rednano.sg/footer/sitemap.html

which has a link to

http://www.rednano.sg/sfe/dirhome.action

Search Engine Friendly Site Structure

In this way, Googlebot will crawl the following path:

-> www.rednano.sg

-> www.rednano.sg/footer/overview.html

-> www.rednano.sg/sfe/dirhome.action

-> the rest of the directory pages

As you can see, this is a site structure that works pretty well despite the fact that the rest of the pages are more than 2 levels below the homepage. If you want to build a Web site with thousand of pages listed in Google search results, make sure you design the site structure and make it “crawlable” and search engine friendly.

According to Wikipedia, “FAST focuses on enterprise real-time data search technologies. It originally owned the web search-engine AlltheWeb as which was later sold to Overture in 2003, now part of Yahoo!.”

So are we talking about a first generation search engine technology that got “eaten up” by Yahoo in 2003?

Now that FAST had changed and focused on enterprise real-time data search technologies, it was still not doing too well lately(Aug 2007) – at least not in the eyes of those 148 people who got retrenched by the company.

Mark Logic’s CEO, Dave Kellogg reported some interesting insight into FAST layoff and financial figures in his blog titled:

Fast Search: The Blood-Letting Begins

• Layoff of 148 employees
• Reduction in operating costs of approximately $12M/quarter
• Up to a $55M one-time restructuring charge
• Of which $25M will be cash (e.g., severance)
• And remaining up to $30M will be non-cash

Enterprise Search Technology

According to my research, the FAST enterprise search technology has been implemented successfully with many big corporations, especially media companies in the USA and Europe.

And recently, it has expanded to Asia, partnering with media company in Japan to provide mobile search and advertising.

SPH is just one of FAST many enterprise search customers since she joint venture with Schibsted International Classifieds & Search AS to form SPH Search. You see, Schibsted is a big customer of FAST since 2005. So it is quite apparent that commercial relationship here is rather complicated and we shall leave that discussion to another article.

Here’s an interview with John Lervik, CEO of Fast Search & Transfer:

Click Here

Is FAST Enterprise Search Good Enough for Singapore Inc?

I got this impression that since we are such a small country, we can just get a search engine software off the shelve and indexed everything about Singapore and serve the information to “people anywhere in the world who want content about Singapore”.

However, if SPH Search plans to target “people anywhere in the world” then it is no longer an enterprise model.

Does SPH Search knows what information people anywhere in the world are looking for about Singapore?

SPH Search for searching SPH web pages

Or is it just to provide a search engine to filter all of SPH owned web pages. And then, when people search for information that can be found in SPH web pages, you will be served with sponsored ads from SPH and not from Google.

If SPH wants to make profit then it is not search engine technology that SPH needs, it needs online advertising technology.

Hopefully, we can get a good search engine with relevant information about Singapore and SPH will not lose too much money.

I think that’s a very ambitious statement! And I really hope SPH will succeed – but it won’t be able to “supplant the big names of Google and Yahoo as the prime tool for sourcing local information”

SPH is taking on Google and Yahoo

Yes, I found this article while researching “SPH Search” on Google. And as reported by The Straits Times (which is owned by Singapore Press Holdings Ltd aka SPH): Watch Out Google, here comes SPH Search

In case, the story is removed, here’s an excerpt of the news report.

You can read from the above news report that SPH wants to be the king of search in Singapore.

Background of SPH Internet Strategy

They could have been, but they screwed up with AsiaOne.com. Four years ago, AsiaOne.com was in a very good position to become the number one local search portal. For many Singaporeans, that was the browser’s Home Page.

To cut the story short, they got greedy and wanted people to pay money for the latest news stories online. On the other side, ChannelNewsAsia.com continued to improve on their contents and provide the latest news for free so all the disgruntled readers from AsiaOne.com moved to ChannelNewsAsia.com.

Here’s the traffic ranking statistics from Alexa.com over the past 5 years:

Since the AsiaOne.com, SPH has been building more new portals, e.g. ST701.com, xin.sg, omy.sg and maybe some others which I am not aware of.

Is SPHSearch.com the domain for SPH Search?

I did a quick check and found that SPH registered sphsearch.com, sphsearch.com.sg and sphsearch.sg. Maybe one of these will be used fro the new search engine. Here’s a shortcut to all three SPH Search sites. [http://www.sph-search.com]

Well, go visit these portals and decide for yourself if SPH has what it takes to “supplant the big names of Google and Yahoo as the prime tool for sourcing local information”.

I will appreciate it if you were to leave your thoughts in the comment box.

This is the first article of a series which focuses on SPH Search. In the next post, we will discuss the technology behind SPH Search.