After reading about Irozho.com, a Kenyan search engine developed by 3 KCA University students , i tried to find out how good it is in terms of search results. Ok, first there is issue of the name, some tweeps commented that the name is a bit strange and might not capture the imagination of many people like Google.
Google has dominated the search engine for sometime and with such a force that challenging it seems to be like wasting time. The likes of WolframAlpha, Cuil came, hyped and then disappeared. One search engine which has had steady market share growth since it was launched is Bing, standing at 12.1% in May according to comScore data. Guess what the search results for Irozho.com is so close to that shown by Bing that it really surprised me.
I was a bit full of myself and took time to search for my name kachwanya, mmh i know but i don’t think i am abnormal to do that, once in a while people Google their names, right? Did i say google? Yeah somehow the word google has become some sort of a verb when referring to searching for something on the internet.
Exactly how a particular search engine’s algorithm works is a closely-kept secret but just look at this direct comparison between Google, Bing, Yahoo search and of course Irozho
Irozho —Showing results 1–10 out of 2,030 for kachwanya
Bing—1-10 of 2,080 results for kachwanya
Google—About 29,400 results (0.22 seconds) for kachwanya
Yahoo—21,700 results for kachwanya:
Looking at the results; Bing returns 2080 while Irozho returns 2030, while Google is far much ahead of the two with 29,400 followed by yahoo with 21,700. But that is not the intriguing part, which is found on the contents of the search results. The first ten outcome of Bing and Irozho is almost identical , actually they are the same. The similarity continues to page two and even three of both search engines. Take a look at the first page on the two search engines:
Irozho.com
irozho
Bing.com
bing results
I tried more different words and phrases and the same pattern continues. Go on and try comparing the two, using other words or phrases and tell me your outcome
I agree , they still need to work on several aspect of it
By the way i am not sure of the meaning of that name..irohzo but it sounds like kikuyu.. Most famous brands around the world started with names which at first made no sense but later on became global names. Personally i would not say the name would limit them, i just think it depends on how they market it
I have checked it out , and the funny thing it looks almost exactly like irohzo.com, how now? Anyway it is great to see Kenyans coming out with new internet projects.
haha!! no disrespect but there is no innovation or engineering work done here. It's just a custom search engine anybody can buy and customize from here!! http://www.inoutscripts.com/products/inout_search…
Next time kachwanya you also need to do some homework!
Actually there is no homework to be done there. Just click on the copy right button at the bottom and you find the link to where they bought the scripts. The following was my twitter reply yesterday to @kihahu regarding the same..so yeah i had done my research boss.
@kihahu You are right, the script found here http://bit.ly/4eFRKV.. powered by rozads services #irozho 10:37 AM Jun 29th via web in reply to kihahu
That still bring me to one question, did Bing buy the same scripts too and why do we think Bing is genius work while not giving the same credit to local lads? At the same time do people have to do it from scratch for it to make sense or do users want something that work for them and do they really care?
At the end it is good to have some intense engineering work in Kenya but i don't think people have to invent the wheel all the time.
You need to learn some that no great technologies work with some controversy.The guy who came up with facebook copied Friend uconnect,.The guys who created the Google as it is only improved on the search engine of the inkotomi and they later copied copied the adword sytstem from some guys .I can tell you many examples about great technology that became successfull because of technology.Lets give this guys achance
this is a great undertaking.i appreciate this.
help me contact irozho owners.I have been trying to get their contacts for almost a year now but av been unscuccessful.I own a couple of website like http://www.moviemail.webs.com,www.antidote.webs.com,www.thewarreview.webs.com,www.softwise.webs.com,www.loopsoft.webs.com,www.jobmail.webs.com.Al be removing that .webs.com thing soon so that it remains .com.I need to contact them really soon so that i can initiate a certain program with them.My email is [email protected] or [email protected]
@kachwanya Thank you so much for the above statement. I am reading this after 4 straight years and your point still makes sense. All these big platforms, their ideas came from other original ideas, that they make better and more modular depending on their target audience. This is what happends at http://www.vibecampo.com