South Africa’s newest search engine, Jonga, is back on Google’s index after disappearing from it for a week without any explanation.
Alistair Carruthers, Jonga’s owner, told the Mail & Guardian Online on Friday that Jonga was officially back on Google’s index at 8pm on Thursday night.
Tectonic magazine reported this week that the search engine had been dropped from the Google index “in its entirety” last week.
Carruthers described the situation as “odd” and said he e-mailed Google but “have received no response from them whatsoever”.
“Google pass a lot of references to us in terms of results on Jonga. But we haven’t been affected in any way. We have been growing on a daily basis,” he said.
Carruthers told Tectonic last week that he had “no idea whatsoever” why Jonga was 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 said.
Although the GoogleBot had sniffed around the website in the past week — visiting only one page each time — the results had not been recorded on Google’s search index, said Carruthers.
Jonga still featured strongly on other search engines. Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista returned the website in their top three results when searching with the term “Jonga”. But even site-specific Google searches came 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 85 000 website domains in the za or za-related name space”, according to Carruthers.
Google did not respond to requests for comment.