The world’s biggest and most famous search engine did a very sneaky thing at the beginning of the year.
Without fanfare, fuss or press releases, Google launched a local version of its site in South Africa. Like a hacker in the night, “Google South Africa” or “Google umZantsi Afrika” launched with a local search in English, Xhosa (spelt “Xhousea” for the first few days), Zulu, Afrikaans and Sotho. One minute South African browsers were pointing to the generic google.com address, then the next they were automatically redirected to the new google.co.za.
The launch whipped the local online community into a bit of a frenzy at the time because of the stealth and mystery with which it was conducted.
What it now also means is that the search engine scene in South Africa is beginning to hot up. It means that the big two entrenched search engines, Ananzi (“Find it fast”) and Telkom’s Aardvark (“Africa’s fastest search engine”), no longer have the control over the local search scene they once had.
Of course before the launch of the local Google, you could still search the South African web via the generic international Google site, but it was largely unintuitive, meaning you would often have to fall back on one of the locals.
Ananzi – one of South Africa’s early internet pioneers – hasn’t had to face up to much competition until now. It is, as one of the top five most visited websites, one of the big boys of the local online publishing scene. It has a monthly readership of just under half-a-million unique users and 10-million page impressions, with a purported healthy dose of local traffic – a prized thing for local websites that get flooded by unviable, bandwidth-costly international traffic.
In the early days, there were challenges from M-Web’s search engine called Max and from something promising called Zebra. But Zebra disappeared as fast as it arrived and Max was absorbed into the main M-Web portal – and with that went its status as a specialised search engine.
Telkom’s Aardvark, which deploys Google search technology, has been quietly racking up hits over the years, but isn’t yet close to challenging Ananzi.
This leaves the local Google as probably the biggest challenger to Ananzi to date. Ananzi boss Mark Buwalda is putting on a brave face, saying he isn’t worried. For him it’s a case of “more the merrier” and he says that Google’s new local site shows that there interest in the product, the services and the SA market.
Although Ananzi and Google SA are both search engines at core, they are different beasts. Google is all about simplicity and it is a highly focused search product.
Ananzi – and Aardvark to a lesser extent – are anything but simplicity. The Ananzi site is a busy clutter of links, information and advertising, resembling more a portal than a focused search engine. In fact, Buwalda would argue he is more like a Yahoo! than a Google.
But the fact remains that it is now easier to search the South African web via Google than ever before – and this is the turf where the locals Ananzi and Aardvark were comfortably dominant.
If anything, Ananzi should capitalise on the fact that it is “Proudly South African” and that it knows how to spell Xhosa correctly. It should urge South African users to support their own homegrown local search product. It could do deals with local online publishers and become their official site search partners – a space Google is already playing in.
So, molo and a warm welcome to South Africa Google. The local search scene just got a whole lot more interesting.
Matthew Buckland is publisher of the Mail & Guardian Online @ www.mg.co.za