Jonga.co.za – South Africa’s Newest Search Engine

Jonga.co.za – South Africa’s Newest Search Engine. I got to know about Jonga.co.za a few weeks before its launch, via Tectonic.

Its developer, Alistair Carruthers, has the lofty idea of making it South Africa’s biggest search engine.

According to Webmonkey.ws, the word “jonga” is derived from Xhosa, and roughly translates as look or aim, and this is what this search engine does. It provides very good search results do its index still has a long way to go, when compare to Google South Africa.

What makes Jonga different from the others?

It’s interface is modern and appealling. The design makes a good use of CSS, while its engine also utilizes RSS.

Try searching for a word like “vodacom” and you would come up with results with link to the most relevant websites. Neatly displayed on the right panel are links to relevant shopping sites, news items, business addresses, listing from its web directory etc. Jonga essentially searches: South African – websites, News, TV listings, Businesses, Properties, Careers/Job offerings, Accomodation, products as well as International news and web sites.

The targeted results are not paid for – Carruthers grabs the data from South African Web sites, including sites like Pam Golding, Kalahari.net, Private Property and Tectonic through “XML interfaces or advanced custom written content recognition utilities based on already spidered pages – either an RSS feed or custom-made feed for Jonga by the website”. One of his biggest stumbling blocks (second only to time constraints) has been to get site administrators to provide the content he needs for his targeted search feature. Says Carruthers: “Hopefully the response once Jonga has launched will result in more websites being receptive in enhancing Jonga’s search capabilities.”

The news making rounds as I type this, is that Google has dropped Jango’s Directory from its index. According to Tectonic:

The search engine was dropped from the Google index “in its entirety” last week, according to owner of Jonga, Alistair Carruthers.

Carruthers says he has “no idea whatsoever” why Jonga is no longer indexed by the world’s biggest search engine.”

You need to see the Jonga search engine, to understand the challenge it poises to Google and other search engine giants. Thus, I’m not very surprised at Google’s action though I’m disappointed.

Did I tell you that Jonga also has a mobile version for PDA and mobile phones at http://mobile.jonga.co.za ? Well, I just did! Cheers 🙂