I’ve been writing about Singapore restaurants that serve “local food” today, so I thought I’d use it as an excuse to try out our new local search engine, RedNano.
Good and bad results.
The Bad
- It’s quick to load (good) with no visible advertising, but if there is advertising it’s hidden in the search results (bad, although I don’t know if that’s the case or not)
- It’s not necessarily as smart as Google. For example, entering “Swissôtel the Stamford”, I plowed through 5 pages of “besthotels” and “discounthotels” results before finding a link to the hotel’s site. Google put the corporate site at number 1.
- The “Images” link is next to useless. All the images returned are from SPH publications and clicking on a thumbnail brings you to a slightly bigger thumbnail and the option to buy the picture.
- At the moment blogs aren’t indexed well (I vanity-searched mine, which was visible through ping.sg but not on its own)
- It’s not always accurate. It returned a link for “Taste of Singapore” Sentosa to www.sentosa.sg, which pulls a 404 (correctly it’s www.sentosa.com.sg)
The Good
Generally it’s a quick and easy way to find relevant results if you’re looking for something Singapore-specific. Looking for Giraffe Restaurant and Bar was as easy as typing Giraffe into the box (relevant result was number 5)
Is it offering any advantages?
Google users here default to google.com.sg and it’s necessary to actually apply a bit of brute force to get out of the .sg zone (you can do it in the “advanced search”). Typing “Giraffe” into Singapore Google got me equally good or slightly better results (relevant result was number 3). It definitely got me better results for Swissotel. RedNano, on the other hand, turned up some nice Singapore-centric links for Street Art, though it didn’t take much to persuade Google to turn up better ones by adding “Singapore” to the search term.
Was RedNano any more local? It didn’t seem to be. It was a nice enough search experience, but I was hoping it was going to offer something a little better (in this case more local) than I could get elsewhere. Otherwise why bother? Instead of offering more it seemed to offer less. I quite often flip between Web and Images in my searches and RedNano wasn’t helpful in that regard. It did have some kind of seemingly hard to navigate Directory of Services though. Search terms in the Directory turned up an assortment of irrelevant results and a law firm called Joyce A. Tan & Partners seemed to come up number one for many of the search terms I tried, but perhaps it will develop into something.
I wanted to like the experience, I really did. But I didn’t.
