Ansearch - New Australian Search Engine

[excell]

Anyone following the Australian Search market couldn't have helped but see the positive acclaim given to Ansearch as they serged up the hitwise charts as an important entity, challenging the likes of Google & Yahoo (even WebWombat, Sensis etc) with their new search technology & product. Clinching a deal with Overture and all set to rock & roll with AU advertisers in March 2005.

Think again...

To cut a long story short here is some info to check for yourself... copied from the comment I made in the article here:
Fledgling Aussie search engine eyeing growth - ZDnet Ansearch Article (http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/0,39023166,39180683,00.htm)
How can any legitimate business justify its purchase of literally hundreds of .com.au domains to capture accidental traffic and drive it to their website and then passed that traffic off as an enormous success and proof of the popularity and the superiority of the features of their new search engine.

It appears that Australian newcomer to the Search Engine scene, Ansearch, is doing exactly that.

The domain names in question are mostly minor variations and misspellings of Australian government departments, organisations and well-known Australian and overseas business names and celebrities etc with a good sprinkling of generic words thrown in as well. They have been set up to route the accidental traffic from those mistyped and wrongly typed web addresses to their own web site (ansearch.com.au) with, in most cases, a 302 redirect. (on a side note - all of these domains are being indexed by Google because of the way they currently handle 302 cases - more clutter and deceptive redirects in the search engines!)

With traffic deadlines to meet before launching into some serious revenue earning predictions and financial backing it is perhaps easy to see why they have opted to use a technique that is more commonly employed in the realm of pornography marketing. But is it appropriate for a publicly listed Australian company to behave in such a dangerously underhanded manner?

With glowing reports about their traffic growth and statistics to prove it are the shareholders aware of Ansearch's very un-Australian behaviour?

A bit of noise is now being created around the search engine forums by web marketers that are concerned about the affect of Ansearch's activities --- not only for the exploitation of search and the Internet in general but also the exploitation of business names and trade names. There appears to be a serious flaw in the AUDA's policies that has allowed this to occur.

All Australian businesses and trademark holders should check to see if they have become a victim of this insidious form of identity theft


Everything I have seen and researched is open to the public to see... My conclusions are my own as is my interpretation. Love it or leave it.

[ihelpyou]

Good stuff excell!

I'm thinking this person posted in here awhile ago, and we kind of let him "have it".

It appears he is not backing off of all the copyright infringements that could be happening, and lots of other stuff.

Any search engine who buys up mispellings, and other bogus domains that don't relate to the search engine is not doing internet users any favors, and is not helping a user find what they need at all. It's simply a desperate engine that needs some money.

[excell]

From what I can understand - ansearch is not a person but a publicly listed company (that means many people).

This is just a heads up for everyone to go look at their trademarked names to make sure they are not being used by the likes of ansearch...

You know - I like to have my choice of typo errors defaulting the way that helps me... without being harrassed.

I didn't mind msn's way & and currently have google handling that... neither of them throw ads or copied my search as a new keyphrase thing to exploit (well as far as I know anyways.)

[Dave Hawley]

Clinching a deal with Overture and all set to rock & roll with AU advertisers in March 2005.Doesn't make Overture look too smart either. :)

[excell]

Yes, it will be interesting to see if the advertisers need for *more traffic* finds it acceptable to sit comfortabily in such arenas. Traffic at all costs?

[ihelpyou]

This is exactly like the domain mongers do. They even hold conferences to talk about domain mongering and getting "traffic" from mispellings and such.

Word has it that this group of people, and there are many, are starting to realize that "targeted" traffic using real websites is the best way to success. Traffic for traffic's sake is too 1999. The last conference they had in Florida, an acquiantance of mine was a speaker at it. She stood up and said "she was stopping" her ways with the buying up of domains for traffic. It "stunned" the attendees. She went on to explain "why".

ansearcher will eventually "get it". I can see Overture not caring however. Afterall; Didn't they partner with gator.com?

[excell]

gator.com.au :bs:

[excell]

Australian IT article - re ansearch & domain names. (http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,12618818%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html)

[ihelpyou]

# abcnews.com.au
# angusandrobertson.com.au
# australiaairlines.com.au
# australiaopen.com.au
# microsoftoffice.com.au
# blockbustervideo.com.au
# foxsport.com.au
# yahho.com.au
# yahoomessenger.com.au
# motorolla.com.au

hmm. Those are some powerful domain names they have.

They got some big companies kind of steamed it seems. :)

[Dave Hawley]

LOL! They have attracted the wrath of news corp and MS, not the sort of attention they should be aiming for! Can't see them lasting too long.

[excell]

Some information has been collated here:
The Ansearch Case Files - A Detailed Six Part Series (http://www.scumware.com/apps/scumware.php/action::view_article/article_id::1112336733/topic::Articles/)

[nuthin]

would like to hear thoughts on the way Google is currently weighting ansearch cached pages and site links this current update.

eg: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=car+sales+perth

should see some ansearch pages featuring on the first page.

good thing? bad thing? short lived?

it's just interesting to see these pages in the serp's.

[Quadrille]

Looks like they creating a bunch of pages on the fly - a favorite trick with spam directories (4 categories, 10 sites, 40,000 pages, you know the kind of thing!).

Google usually drops them in the end, but these folk may be using slightly different methods.

[nuthin]

made mainstream press here yesterday in Australia about ANsearch's caching of there directory and results in Google.

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,16949901%5E15318%5E%5Enbv%5E15306,00.html

we have had a few clients which may have been penalized because of this.. there sites arent showing up anymore where they used to be, but ansearch's version of our clients sites are .. well the original source (our client) has dropped back.

thanks to http://www.e-cbd.com/ for drawing press attention to it.
hopefully ansearch decides to do something &/or Google now knows about it.

[Quadrille]

"Most sites have a robots file that may contain a do-not-follow tag," Mr Jones said. "That's something we've been made aware of recently and which were going to address in the next version of our spider." Nice to know they know what they're doing. Finally :rolleyes:

[Comeran]

What is the name of their spider? I am not familiar but would like to add it to the robots.txt file of all the sites we work on.

Thanks.

[g1smd]

This issue isn't so much about Ansearch having cached copies of websites on their site (Google does that too, of course) but of allowing other search engines to spider and index those copies.

By talking about robots.txt Ansearch are possibly trying to shift the blame on to website owners, rather than fixing the problem on their own site.

The fix?

Ansearch to add this tag to every cached page: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">



If they blame it on a coding error, then that'll be twice in as many days that I'll have heard this :BS: from a spammer.

[nuthin]

:(
i think its probably a bit more bad for us than i first thought.
do a search on google.com.au for the keyword "property management perth"
our client access property management used to show via there domain and have a pretty decent pagerank.
now ansearch has taken its place and access property is gone.
what should we do here ?
contact Google?

[g1smd]

Click the "disatisfied with the results" link and fill in a full report.

If you are doing that around 2005 October 20th then include the keyword jagger1 in the "additional information" area, as recommended by Matt Cutts in his GoogleBlog today.

[nuthin]

Thanks g1smd. appreciated :)

Going to have to go through all the sites they cached of ours today when i'm in the office & try and see what sites of ours are effected.

I can't believe they are able to steal our clients positioning.
Will be interesting when I go over our client list today, I think I will more than likely find the same trend happening on the sites that have lost there placement recently.

hopefully Google will rectify this issue.

might even try to contact Australian It (News.com.au) to do a followup on that article if I find enough proof.

will let you's know.

[Comeran]

Isn't a temporary solution to this situation to just add a robots.txt line that bans that search engine from caching and spidering your site so they can't offer these files to other search engines?

If you were to do that would they delete the old cached files that they have?

What is the name of their spider so you can add that to your robots.txt file?

[g1smd]

You could do that, but (going by past experience) Google will continue to cache the duplicate pages for at least another 18 months in their Supplemental Index.

[Comeran]

Well then it wouldn't strike me as the best way to deal with this. I can't even imagine how pi$$ed you must be about having your sites replaced with this spammer. It is almost like the scraper that savvy was dealing with :/

Does anyone know what can be done to stop this company from using your cached pages and stop them from spidering you faster than 18 months?

[excell]

http://www.ansearch.com.au/corporate/for_webmasters/remove.html - Ansearch Removal Request...

zdnet article...Ansearch faces cache critics (http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Ansearch_faces_cache_critics/0,2000061791,39217488,00.htm)

Ansearch chief executive Dean Jones said what his competitors chose to index was out of his control.
Dean figures out that there is an item called a robot.txt and yet has no control?

I know this is old hat - but just thought I would post in case anyone was wondering about Ansearch and their fantastic search engine.

[Quadrille]

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

[excell]

been there - done that :)
Ansearch is going to be persistant - Dean thinks he can hack it. Gotta love them.. LOL

[Quadrille]

I suspect you are right - they'll keep going until Google effectively closes them down, then spend six months whining how unfair it all is!