What happens when you cannot find a search engine? South Africa’s newest search engine, Jonga, disappeared from Google’s index last week without a trace. Jonga’s owner, Alistair Carruthers, is wondering why.
Web users searching for South Africa’s newest search engine, Jonga, on Google are more likely to find an Indian army 4×4 vehicle, a South African tour company or the genealogy of a German whose name is “Jonga”. That is, if they find it at all.
The search engine was dropped from the Google index “in its entirety” last week, according to Jonga owner Alistair Carruthers.
Carruthers says he has “no idea whatsoever” why Jonga is no longer indexed by the world’s biggest search engine.
“The interesting thing is that a lot of South African-related searches on Google were displaying results from Jonga’s web directory and thus a lot of traffic was being forwarded from Google to Jonga’s web directory and search,” he says.
Although the GoogleBot has sniffed around the website in the last week — visiting only one page each time — the results have not been recorded on Google’s search index, says Carruthers.
“I did contact Google via the usual channels; however, I only received automated responses, which I did respond to and at this stage have received no feedback from them,” he says.
Carruthers says Jonga has yet to record a decline in traffic.
“Since Jonga was launched only a month ago, its traffic has been growing on a daily basis and thus the effect of being removed from Google’s index hasn’t adversely affected our traffic; however, we do miss the referral traffic,” he says.
Jonga still features strongly on other search engines. Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista return the website in their top three results when searching with the term “Jonga”. But even site-specific Google searches come up empty-handed.
Jonga, which launched in December 2005, uses open-source Apache Lucene as its text search back-end. It features more than 26-million websites in its index and “at least 85Â 000 website domains in the za or za-related name space”, according to Carruthers.
Google did not respond to requests for comment. — Tectonic