Pandia Post No. 26 Part 2

Seekport: European search engine making progress

By Lars Våge, InternetBrus

Seekport is an interesting new European search service. The search engine was launched in Germany in June 2004 with an index of German web pages.

From the start it has been possible to target searches by selecting one of eight broad topic areas. It seems that Seekport is using an automatic categorization process that sorts any web document into one or more categories (Themenbereiche).

You will find these categories in the search engine results as well, and they are of great help when you try to make sense out of the listings.

Note that this type of categorization is not the same as the clustering techniques used by Vivisimo and others. Search engines using clustering will not categorize the web pages before the search is done, whereas the categories used by Seekport are defined in advance.

During the fall of 2004 Seekport launched versions of its search engine for France (October) and Great Britain (December). Unfortunately these versions lack the categorization found at the German site.

The German and French versions are focused on sites from the relevant countries as well as French and German language sites in general. The UK version includes British sites only.

The German version got another new feature in March this year. If you enter an ambiguous search term, (e.g. homograph), Seekport will suggest ways of making the search more precise.

All three versions now allow you to open an inline window displaying a “preview” of listings. This is a very useful feature, which to my knowledge only can be found at Wisenut, Vivisimo and Clusty as regards the larger search sites.

Seekport has done its best to sort out spam. In particular it has focused on removing sites with so-called dialers that attempt to hi-jack modems.

The company has also produced a small folder with search tips that can be downloaded, printed and kept on your desktop.

Furthermore, Seekport offers Seekbot, a service that will analyze to what extent your webpages are “search engine friendly” for free.

See also Pandia's article: "Seekport launches UK search engine"

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