Jonga launches
Jonga, a new South African search engine, launched today. Via Tectonic:
After a two year labour of love, coffee and coding, Alistair Carruthers unveils South Africa's biggest search engine. Carruthers marries open source technologies like Lucene with Microsoft's proprietary .Net framework for a truly inspiring result.
The local search engine market has quite a history.
The first one I can remember was Ananzi which had a good start in the mid 90's, but lost the plot over the years with it's bloated and irrelevant portal content and ads.
Aardvark originated in early 1997, and was created and maintained by Intekom - previously a wholly owned subsidiary of Telkom SA. Much like Ananzi, it has evolved into nothing more than an ad-infested portal and is now powered by Google South Africa, returning the same results in an uglier package.
Zebra followed, engineered by the powerhouse of synergy that was THOS. It showed promise but was short lived, and has since reappeared as an African Travel search (nice logo).
Funnel is fairly new to the game, having launched 6 months ago. ITWeb gave it an unenthusiastic review in June, and it hasn't improved much since then. It denied rumours a month after launch that it was intentionally blocking rival sites such as News24.com in it's results - since it's partnered with IOL and partly owned by Sales and Marketing Director Leon Lategan - while coming under fire for missing .com links.
ITWeb's review makes a strong point, which also applies to the South African web in general:
While Funnel plays on its "proudly South African vibe", it doesn't offer the local language options that Google does.
Google South Africa supports 4 of our 11 official languages, English excluded - Afrikaans, Sesotho, Zulu & Xhosa.
Back to Jonga... "a South African search engine born out of pure frustration with the lack of SA-relevant results returned by search engines".
I first heard about Jonga earlier this year when it appeared in my referrer logs with a development test URL. I was curious to read that it finally launched ("jonga is launched!" reads their homepage.. heh), and took it for a quick test drive. First impressions today are that it looks good, and is free of advertising, but could use some tweaking beneath the skin.
For starters, it's erratically slow. I searched for jonga and waited 40 seconds for the results, but tried again minutes later and waited for a mere 0.3 seconds.
The name Jonga is derived from the South African Xhosa language, and roughly translates to look or aim, but it too suffers from the English-only syndrome.
The footer reveals a number of further shortcomings, firstly this message which takes us back some years:
This site is designed for Microsoft Internet Explorer v6.00 or greater at a resolution of 1024x768.
And the following claim:
Searching over 22,500,000 web pages and growing.
Funny then, that the link - which searches on ".za", returns only 21,868,749 results, with "Air France Southern Africa" the second result? This made me wonder how sites are ranked.
I performed a seach for "coda" and discovered that sites linking to mine appear higher in the ranks than my site itself, which infact I didn't even find after the 5th page of results. When trying "coda.coza", my site appears under "Results in other target areas" on the side - perhaps because it's hosted on a German server, which shouldn't matter either way.
One final test, I searched for "telkom": 359,703 found in 0.047s.
The first result is indeed Telkom SA Limited, but links to http://www.telkom.co.za/verifyadsl instead of their homepage. Weird. I then tried jumping to the 2000th result by changing the (rather crufty) URI querystring, and received the following amusing page:
Displaying results 2001 to 1000 of 359,703 found in 0.266s
Apologies! - Returned results limit reached.
Jonga does not provide more than 1000 results on a query.
I would never normally click through to the 2000th result, but surely if they're claiming to have that many results then they should all be accessible?
Jonga has a 'search history' drawer, hidden away on the left. I would never use this since Firefox remembers my previous search terms anyway, and it's clumsily implemented - the sliding animation is time consuming and unnecessary.
I like the 'preview' feature link associated with each search result, which reveals a scrolling frame with the result's page embedded. I'm not sure I would use it that often though - I find it easier to simply open the result in a new browser tab with a click of my mouse scroll wheel.
Lastly, http://jonga.co.za doesn't resolve - one of my big pet hates.
In conclusion, Jonga is a welcomed addition to the South African web but it remains to be seen how it evolves over the next year. Share your thoughts with a comment.
UPDATE [06/12]: http://jonga.co.za now resolves, the site was reindexed and footer figures/wording adjusted, and the browser requirement was removed. View Alistair's comment for further clarification on points I raised above.
UPDATE [09/12]: Breaking News! Yahoo! have bought del.icio.us! Search engine + social software web service = new breed.
- comments are closed
27 Comments
Out of that whole long and heart sore story about SA search engines all I could see is a man that is really upset that when his site is entered into the search engine his site does not come up as nr#1 but only on the 5th page ;-P …..life is a b1tch coda and then you marry one
I do agree with wa, but I also like the UI of jonga.co.za … searched myself and some mates … have u checked the results for coda? I found this.
I banned jonga a few months back because when it was crawling my website it was putting blanks into to my comments (yes, I have validation and it shouldn’t have been happening)… I went to their website on numerous occasions trying to get some info as to who, why and what, not with much luck as there wasn’t anything there, simply a ‘coming soon’ splurb / banner. Thanks for the write-up…
LOL, did you see result 11 for ‘coda’?
Hey, I’m #1 on my international search Dame – sorry for yoooooou!!!
LMAO at #11 ‘coda’ result.
Another funny thing is (in FF, at least) that when you click through to the next results page, it tries to stick scrolling to the bottom, and doesn’t let you scroll back up to the top… weird.
Tripeak, I agree that the UI is actually pretty well designed, the background-color hovering subtly helps you see where you are, the lines separating results also help, and the spacing and padding is actually pretty effective…
Check out codamusic, Fran designed it for them.
Warrenski, rubbish about SA sites not offering anything! Yes, we have enough morons around here, but there are plenty all over the world… Thanks for being a proud South African :-P
Hi Damien
Thanks for the comments regarding jonga which I really do appreciate and would like to provide some clarification to questions you raised about jonga.
As one of your visitors already posted “It’s my opinion that we don’t need a local-only search engine; Google does a fine job.” – Google does do a great job but alot of people haven’t seen alot of what jonga is capable of. Jonga is a search engine however also is a content engine. It doesn’t only spider but is also hooked into numerous SA websites which it pulls content from on a live/ongoing basis. What this means is that most dynamic content is obviously highly relevant to SA as well as current. The advantage of this is very obvious if you had to search on jonga for: tonight on mnet, sunday 25 december 2005 on mtv at 8pm, 2 bedroom townhouses in cape town, managers position in johannesburg, accommodation in cape town in a hotel and then pay attention to the right hand side of the search results (try your own variants or queries). I’d like to invite you to compare these types of results to other search engines.
Back to a few things that I’d like to help address if I may.
“For starters, it’s erratically slow. I searched for jonga and waited 40 seconds for the results, but tried again minutes later and waited for a mere 0.3 seconds.”
I’m not quite sure why this occurred however it mightve been due to a restart of the search application in the backend (possible adjustment of memory resources etc that needed to be done) – typical results should not take longer than 5 secs at the harshest load however the average response time for the actual search (and not loading of the page) is averaging around a second.
“The name Jonga is derived from the South African Xhosa language, and roughly translates to look or aim, but it too suffers from the English-only syndrome.”
I’d like to offer all official language translations however my time has been spent getting the final site together. Jonga is not my day job – it’s a hobby and it’s just me and I am my only resource. I hope to add at least 2 or 3 additional languages to jonga even if it is the Google route and have the core of the site available in other languages.
“The footer reveals a number of further shortcomings, firstly this message which takes us back some years: This site is designed for Microsoft Internet Explorer v6.00 or greater at a resolution of 1024×768.”
I see your point – it has been removed however jonga is optimised for display at 1024×768.
“Funny then, that the link – which searches on “.za”, returns only 21,868,749 results, with “Air France Southern Africa” the second result? This made me wonder how sites are ranked. “
At this weekend jonga was sitting at around 26,300,000 urls however after reindexing part of the site jonga dropped down to 21,868,749 urls due to a failure on a particular url section which failed indexing and became corrupted. This figure should be above the 22,500,000 mark once the current spidering routine has completed and been indexed (sometime this evening/early morning). This is a static text link.
The second part to the statement in respect of how sites are ranked is a rather interesting one. To scrutinise a result based on a search for a “.za” query is a bit odd as it has relevance to every single page which jonga stores in one way or another. The ranking algorithm is based on numerous different factors including inlinks, outlinks, keyword factoring etc.
“I performed a seach for “coda” and discovered that sites linking to mine appear higher in the ranks than my site itself, which infact I didn’t even find after the 5th page of results. When trying “coda.coza”, my site appears under “Results in other target areas” on the side – perhaps because it’s hosted on a German server, which shouldn’t matter either way.”
Your website is not actually in jonga’s index. The reason for that is that your http://www.coda.co.za redirects to coda.co.za and jonga ignores redirects to different hostnames unless it is to a www.* – this is to reduce the load in terms of sites which have many hostnames that all point to the same content or spam artists that register 500 domains or create various hostnames and redirect/point them to a single site. As http://www.sitename.co.za is generally accepted this was the route I chose in terms of a few rules that jonga obeys.
“One final test, I searched for “telkom”: 359,703 found in 0.047s.
The first result is indeed Telkom SA Limited, but links to http://www.telkom.co.za/verifyadsl instead of their homepage. Weird. I then tried jumping to the 2000th result by changing the (rather crufty) URI querystring, and received the following amusing page: I would never normally click through to the 2000th result, but surely if they’re claiming to have that many results then they should all be accessible?”
The ranking algorithm as stated before is based a number of different factors that result in a page’s rank. The ADSL verify page (in this case) has a higher result than their front page due to the fact that more external websites point to that page as opposed to the telkom.co.za home page. Jonga does take into consideration the domain name of a website however this is a minor factor in comparison to other variables used to determine ranking. You’ll note that with each result returned by jonga there is a link to the home page/base url of the website the result is from. A reason for the minimal contribution of the domain name is to avoid the common search engine type result of http://www.are-you-looking-for-telkom.com used by people trying to boost their rankings.
In regards to the 2000th result – It is common practice for search engines to limit results that are returned. This is for a number of reasons. The first is email harvesting or other data extraction and the other is purely from a performance point of view. Google returns a maximum of 1000 results. MSN is in the region of 450-500 results and most other search engines are somewhere around there. Also bare in mind that the index everyone is searching is around 1.2 Terrabytes.
Once again thanks for your blog post and comments – it’s always interesting to read what people have to say about jonga as it helps to refine it and make it better.
Regards,
Alistair Carruthers
jonga.co.za
coda, thanks for the great post about THOS. Pity it’s all over now. Used to be the creative director there – spent about 6 years designing and learning how the Web works. Zebra was great – its success killed it though. We couldn’t keep up with the demand once we had it live and had to pull it down again.
With regards to Jonga, the overall design is good looking. However, I would centre the site (let’s see more of that great background), lose the results icon and make the entire grey hover on the result clickable.
Hi Matt
Thanks for the input – I’ll play around with the design. The original grey hover over each result used to be completely clickable using an onclick event however alot of people who were testing it liked to middle click to open a tab and thus because it was an onclick it didn’t obey the user and just opened the page I changed it to a standard ‘a href’…
ciao
al
sarah: it was on the first page yesterday, hah! (This was my reply btw).
Martin: I was looking at Fran’s site yesterday, she has a great style! Who would have thought pink and orange… ;)
Alistair: thanks for your reply and clarifying the points I raised. As I now understand, one of Jonga’s biggest strengths is it’s uniqueness in many respects.
On first visit however, Jonga will more than likely be compared to Google. Since the results aren’t similar to what one would expect, this could be considered a flaw and leave the visitor with the wrong impression. What might help this is if you added a welcoming “take a tour” feature to guide the user around how Jonga works, why it’s different, and what the results (and their icons) mean. For example, I don’t know what sets “ZASITE” and “ZAWEB” apart?
In addition to that, marketing Jonga as “south africa’s search engine” is limiting if it’s a ‘content engine’ too, as you mentioned. I realise saying this doesn’t make much sense since the content is searchable, but do you understand what I mean?
I’d overlooked the directory before – nice. I like the paging at the bottom – is this something you’re going to add to the search results pages as well?
My website is not a .za but is located on a local sever, I think Janga should consider that not all SA related websites use the .za…
Just my 2c worth.
Otherwise I am quite impressed!
RC
Hey Alastair, much respect on the quick response bro.
If your search engine is as quick as it’s founder it’ll be well cool…!
hmm,,, two things,,,
1.
jonga which i suppose is taken from the xhosa word: ‘look (in the imperative)’, right? that disturbs me, what does looking have to do with ’searching’,,, but alas i know i am black, and i am south african, but i hate the idea of ‘white’ south africa using ‘native’ african languages out of context to make cash (read: black-expoitation). but, hey, who am i?
2.
i think somebody did mention that whole, ’south african’ based search engine being rather a waste, and make it more of a global thing and concentrates on south african content, right? assuming that was said, wouldn’t it be cooler, that search engines developed a more user-focused idea; rather me ‘needing’ jonga to tell me what to ‘jonga’ (pun intended)?
if the south african ‘web/content’ market is small, it would be interesting if jonga was to focus on what these south african’s are ‘browsing’,,, which i suppose assumes that all south africans tend to ‘jonga’ the the same things and thus instead of waiting for ‘jonga’ to tell me what to ‘jonga’ it would cool to follow what other south african’s are ‘jonga-ring’?
honestly, this is probably the only time, i’d use jonga, because it provides with nothing but web 1.0 ideas,,, don’t y’all think people (web users) are no longer searching for ’sites’ but searching for specific ‘content’,,,
word.
sup lebogang
As Alistair mentioned above, Jonga is a content engine too – apart from returning specific sites it does tons more. This is easily overlooked and I missed it myself the first time. Find a job, property, xmas gift, times for your favourite soapy…. you name it.
What you mention about social searching/bookmarking (del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, or Daypop for example) is very interesting. I don’t know if SA is ready for that, taking recent studies into consideration – but would love to see someone giving it a go. User growth may be crawling but the local web surely isn’t – what more evidence do you need than the surge in the number of local bloggers this year alone.
Creating a social network of these users is something that no big SA players appear to be interested in, apart from M&G’s blogmark or MWEB’s Blogspace attempts. M&G doing blogs? Talk about lost focus; you don’t see CNN or BBC offering blog services. The web, browsers, and it’s users are continously evolving and the market is wide open again.
Look what MSN South Africa are doing these days. M&G, MWeb, iafrica, IOL, News24… they’re too busy wasting their energy trying to win traffic and referrals or sell insurance and medical aid, instead of providing their existing users with a quality service. Correct me if I’m wrong, but none of them offer their content in any language other than English or Afrikaans. Maybe that explains the slowing growth trend – over 75% of our population’s mother tongue isn’t recognized by 100% of our websites. But then, what of the 75% have internet access in the first place? I don’t know.
Anyway. The idea of pushing content is still fairly undeveloped… add some AI and who knows, look what Amazon are doing with their personalized recommendations. That’s powerful stuff.
Having tried Jonga again, in light of Alistair’s recent comments to this blog post, I must congratulate him and applaud him on a fine effort, not just technically, but also for having taken the risk and producing the site in such a saturated (global) market. I’ll be interested to see how the engine evolves as the finer glitches are ironed out and things are tuned. One hint Alistair, perhaps look at dropping the partial table-based layout, deprecated HTML elements and inline-styles in favour of the standards-based approach.
I agree with your points above coda. At the moment, it is kind of “well, what’s the point building sites and growing local-only services when their reach is so severely limited”. Our most obvious hurdle locally is the poor rate of broadband penetration. Until the cost of Internet access and lines are reduced in this country, we’ll continue to have a problem with slow adoption. Compared to the rest of Africa, we’re starting to creep behind. Next year is predicted to be the year for SA’s broadband-boom, so let’s hold thumbs and see what impact there is.
I definitely think there’s a market for local content and social-networking type sites, having myself witnessed the tremendous growth of DatingBuzz in this country. Also, when you consider how South African’s devour cellular content, it makes me drool with excitement about the potential revenue streams that could emerge once more locals are online.
In the cellular market, language doesn’t really seem to be a problem. I’m sure that if sites are created in a simple manner, with special attention to the UI and not tied to a particular browser, we’d have a good platform for attracting locals – but only when sites are that intuitive. I’m afraid that this country sadly has a reputation (in my mind at least) of offering the opposite of that goal.
On a cultural level, do we have any understanding of what content to offer the broad spectrum of South Africans??
Ola.
just ‘re looked’ jonga (hahaha)!
The other south african content. I just wonder if it’s worth the effort to develop content in the other south african languages, it would be cool, but I wonder if there is a point to it. let me explain,,,
Imagine if this site, coda, was in zulu for example, that would be cool, but if we look at the process that one would take to end up browsing this site, one would have to understand english first; from booting the computer, to login in, to opening a broswer, to typing the url, one goes through a lot of english,,, which if you can get to this site, you have an understanding of english, which could mean, you don’t need this site to be in ‘zulu’?
i am not a pessimist, but I do believe the language problem can be traced back to education; until south african can educate it’s people through other languages except english/afrikaans this problem will not exists; because if we don’t use ‘native’ (if i can call them that, for now) languages on our day to day functional/business/personal level, what’s the point of using the language on the web;
on internet access; i don’t believe the cost of access is an important factor yet, because i don’t believe you and I a using the internet purely because we can afford it, i think we use it because we know what it can do for us, personal & business wise,,, why the hell would a taxi driver want internet access relative to his day to day ‘work’? me and you can explain why he should, but it’s not that important yet to him,,, where am I going with this, i think, technology should be worked around the people, not the otherway round,,, (huh?)
on broad south african content,,, listen to the radio and not the 5fm/metro or yfm,,, listent to the other stations,, i know there is language barrier,,, maybe we should try to learn from the ‘native’ radio stations in order to understand how to develop web content,,, we all know Ukhozi FM has the largest listnership in the country,,,, or maybe if we could develop a technology that allows people to access the internet via ‘the radio’,,, wow that would be cool, that would be pretty cool.
okay, i could be rambling, here, but i think there is truth in there somewhere,,, i think,,,
Hi Lebogang
The name jonga that was used to name the search engine was used due to the fact that I wanted to be a little different in naming the site. It has nothing to do with “black exploitation” or to do with making “cash”. Proof of this is the fact that jonga is just me – just one person and currently is a private website with no revenue streams and being funded by my own dayjob salary.
The idea for the name actually came from one of my good friends (and yes a black mate of mine) and it was shortened to jonga so that it would be easy to spell.
In regards to what South Africans are browsing this is possible however they would have to have some sort of software installed and even then I would not like to infringe on South African’s right to privacy. I will be adding a “what is south africa looking for” section once jonga has more traffic and more searches obviously.
Thanks for your comments.
Kind Regards,
Alistair
Warren, good point about DatingBuzz – it would be interesting to see your user statistics and how closely (or not) they represent SA as a whole in ethnic groups and language. ;)
lebogang: Good points too, thanks – I like where this discussion is going. Education is coming right. So if I use Xhosa as an example – which is supported on Windows, is available for the Firefox web browser (thanks to the efforts of Translate.org.za), and supported by Google SA – English will still be required to get around some places, but not entirely. Is this not an ideal that we should be working towards? I agree, technology should be worked around the people, which is why I’m driving this point about indigenous language support online.
Or rather, the lack thereof.
While I’m not at liberty to divulge full statistics that we’ve gathered, I can state that just over half of our worldwide member-base is South African. Our neighbouring countries and other prominent African countries also feature in our top 20 countries.
40% of our South African member-base indicate English as a home language, compared to 20% for Afrikaans, and an average of about 1.7% for each of our other 9 official languages with figures for Zulu, Xhosa and Tswana (in that order) being highest.
We’ve recently completed an Afrikaans translation of the site, and would welcome any offers for help with translation to South Africa’s other 9 official languages.
Nice, good to know, thanks bro
Somewhat-related links via Tectonic (I also encourage you to subscribe to their RSS feed):
African broadband access accelerates
City of Cape Town to be a ‘leader in OSS’
The Hoff likes Jonga and if the The Hoff likes it, it is hoff stuff
Alistair, does Jonga have a page to report search spam?
Hi Purple Cow
Are you referring to search spam found in the results of jonga searches or just in general to find such pages?
Al
I’m referring to search spam that will crop up on the SERPs.
As an SEO I like to report any kind of spam activity that I come across, so I’d want report potential spam sites or things like invisible keyword stuffing, underhanded cloaking etc somewhere easily.
Also I have noticed there is a rather nasty 42 character limit on the search field itself which makes long queries or site specific queries (where you put site:www.mydomain in front of the query) almost impossible to do.
Jonga does not cover all websites in South Africa, from Tectonic
“at least 85 000 website domains in the ZA or ZA related name-space,â€
my own co.za directory lists 170 269 active domains
secondly there is no filtering of duplicate pages which is very time consuming
thirdly wrong pages come up top, search for “Pretoria Linux Distributors” find pages with link to atual page only
I rather use google.co.za
hey, i just used jonga to look for dedicated hosting in south africa with a south african ip address (don’t ask why, just light your touch and burn every company that caps international ips),,,
alas, my point is, google couldn’t find me what i wanted, but jonga found me web-farm, which has been around since 1997. i am impressed, i take back every bad word i have used,,, alas i still think there,,, interface could more 2.0;
word.
05 December 2005
warrenski08:11 pm
It’s my opinion that we don’t need a local-only search engine; Google does a fine job. It’s also my opinion that sites in this country have very little to offer the world in any case, and browsing through local sites usually just leaves me frustrated, even amongst large corporate websites (broken links, poor design/usability, sparse content, unexplained error messages mid-HTTP response/reliability issues, inexplicably biased browser support, poor site performance, etc. etc.)