Libby Young
The last year has seen South African cyberspace grow up. The number of users has passed that crucial one million benchmark, Web addresses are starting to appear on bumper stickers and no business card is complete without an e-mail address.
So what’s been happening to South Africa’s search engines? Newcomer Max, , from M-Web, combines a search facility with a Web directory. With more than a thousand subsections, Max catalogues more than 10 000 South African websites. With clear descriptions, an easy-to-use navigational structure and very few dud links, the directory is certainly heading for the top of the local heap.
Max’s search facility, using Excalibur Retrieval software, produces rated results that may require a bit of weeding. With links to the Daily Mail & Guardian’s headlines, a listing of the top 10 sites and a variety of bulletin boards, Max is one of the best places to start an exploration of the South African Web.
Veteran Ananzi, , is now a firm candidate for portal status, and recently joined forces with Braby’s, Africa’s largest business directory, resulting in the addition of 500 000 companies to its catalogue. Created in the Web dark ages of 1996, Ananzi now indexes more than 87 000 Web pages, and offers a free Web-based mail service, chatlines, news and weather updates. The accuracy of search results has improved over the past year, and the speed of retrieval is also up. Ananzi also provides easy access to the international AltaVista search engine. The Web directory would benefit from longer descriptions and more maintenance is needed to weed out the dud links, but this is an excellent database.
Aardvark, , provides percentages for its search results, giving a good idea of how relevant they are. Aardvark, which was established in 1997, provides the most abundant results, but this means plenty of weeding. A drop downlist allows easy access to Infoseek, and this is often the best choice for South African searches too. The catalogue is excellent, with meaningful descriptions and a chilli rating for “hot” sites.
Voted best search engine of 1998 by the Sunday Times, Zebra, , currently indexes more than 100 000 pages. The search facility, currently a beta version, produces plenty of accurate results, with my only quibble the gobbledygook of the descriptions. All the site’s imagery is black and white, optimising speed. Zebra has a neat Web directory and links to a variety of online services, such as currency rates, electronic postcards, weather reports and postal codes.
Gogga, , indexes articles from the local online media. It searches the major online newspaper publishers, including the Independent Online, FMi, Business Times, Business Day, Beeld, Die Burger and, naturally, the Daily Mail and Guardian, as well as the South African embassy in Washington. Unfortunately, it doesn’t deliver the goods. Searches on “Winnie” and “Madikizela” produced no results for the Daily Mail & Guardian or the Business Times over the past three years. Looks like the mother of the nation needs a new press secretary!
Fanagalo, , is also dedicated to scouring South African news sites, allowing searches to be narrowed down to the past 24 hours. But it gives no results to the term “Mandela”, even when the period “at any time” is selected. On the plus side, you will find links to the latest stories every day.
If you’re a whiz at advanced searching or prepared to wade through an avalanche, you may often get better results from an international search engine. Hotbot is especially helpful for African searches, as a drop-down list on the home page lets you restrict your results to websites originating on the continent. Infoseek and AltaVista produce consistently good results for South African sites. Remember that sites containing important African content are often not based here.
The Daily Mail & Guardian’s Jumpstart catalogue, , is designed for the surfer intent on research, and lists the major political, business, arts, travel, education and African sites. South Africa Online, , is a catalogue with news, horoscopes and other snippets like currency rates and postal codes.
More information on searching the Net can be foundat PC Review Online,