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.