Hi guys

I must firstly thank you for all your comments on this blog post about Grabble.co.za. I am very pleased to see people enjoying it.

Firstly let me clarify the south african website issue. As Tom from findsa.co.za said in his post earlier there really is no easy way to distinguish if a TLD like .com is a South African website. Tom and I both run search engines and we have chatted about this issue.

Ideally what you want is a SE that can “think for itself” and interpret your search queries for you. If we could achieve this then we could start to tell who in the world is really south african and who is not.

At the moment the way Grabble is structured is to only index sites that fall within the za namespace. This means we index co.za, org.za, gov.za, za.net, com.za, etc.

I am working as we speak on a new modification to Grabble to allow it to index other domains as well. For example I also running satopsites.com and that is not indexed in grabble because of the indexing rules.

Once this mod has been applied on the live server you will start to see many more .com domains however we are ultimately going to have to rely on user submissions to build the .com database up.

If there is one thing I want it is to only index sites that truly are South African and whenever you rely on computer scripting and “robots” this makes the task very difficult.

PS. Point taken on the magnifying glass pointing over libya… will need to fix this 🙂

Let me know if you have any other questions.