Nic’s blog
I write about building businesses, failing and building a life, not a legacy.
Ananzi in top ten local websites
Mybroadband recently released the usual top ten for SA websites. I am shocked that Ananzi is anywhere even close to the top ten never mind in the top ten.I am even more shocked that Ananzi is actually still around. With that said I have just visited the site and am even more surprised to learn that there has been a major redesign that I am pleasantly impressed with. Now I cannot really continue with my little rant about users inability to move the times because it seems as though the product has done so before the user needed to.I remember Ananzi being frustratingly text heavy and irritatingly cluttered. This is not the case anymore. I haven't used Ananzi for over years because of the issues that I had. I didn't even check the site because of my frustration, this seems to have been my mistake in hindsight!I will definitely be using Ananzi over the next few weeks and see how it goes because design may be all good but search engines are meant to search effectively. I am not convinced that Ananzi is doing this yet.I just searched for myself (nic haralambous) on Ananzi, the top results involved Shaun Dewburry, some myspace chick, South African artist called nic, an accounting firm and a business report involving some dude called nic.That is shocking considering I own and run 4 local websites (one of which is nicharalambous.com). When I searched for nicharalambous I got zilch. Not impressed here, at all. Not only are the results shoddy, but I was asked by the site to put all names with a Capital Letter. Seriously, how much admin is that if you don't know what you are doing and you leave out the capital letter, the search engine doesn't recognise that you are searching for a person... as if that should matter.Google's search results for nic haralambous returned results involving things that I have done (1st was this blog (3jobblog)) people who have linked to me and sites that I own, all in the top ten!! Now you have to wonder why people use Google. I also didn't need to put my name with capital letters!I don't know, you tell me, how is it possible that such a rubbish search engine with such a great design (cough, cough) manages to maintain a top ten position for local websites?