Arabs outdo Google???

Recently I have been reading about a new search engine that is developed by a saudi young guy. The claims are that the new engine, Amamk.com outperforms Google in all aspects. Being a Google competitor by it self is a huge word to be said, while countries are paying millions to outdo Google with no luck. Now that does not mean its not possible, but to hear it all of a sudden, and to come from the Arab world is surely another shock. The site has been growing in popularity in the middle-east, probably more because they feel loyal to it.

Being a search engine fan, I thought of giving it a test. I knew the comments are exaggerating, but perhaps the guy is on the right track. So i had in mind the two main factors of assessing the search engine. 1) Response time, 2) Result relevancy. The first one favored Google with less than 1 second response time, while the second took around 8 seconds for the same word "test". Now going on to the relevancy, searching Google for "test" gave results that seemed more desirable and focused than Amamk, according to several people who have tested it with me as well. But this comparison is judgmental, so I thought of doing the test for images instead. Here are the results I found for searching the word "dog" on Amamk.com and here are the same results from Yahoo . As you can see for yourself, its a perfect match. I have tried other several queries for images and videos as well, and they mostly always match. For Web and Audio, the results were different, and I have read reviews saying Web was powered by Google at a time.

All in all, this site, for image and video at least seems to be powered by Yahoo, but the site doesnt mention anything about it. I have also contacted the site owner by email, when his whole site was down and took the chance to ask whether it is powered by Yahoo and what is the reason behind the results relevancy, but I got no reply.

This is not the only thing that's weird however. Most search engines, if you go to the About Us section, you will see details about their search and ranking criteria, the spider names they have registered, the range of IPs in use to index the web, and how you can submit your site to their engine. Amamk does not even have About Us section or anything else like that. The site instead, urges visitors at the end of the page to click the sponsored ads links to keep powering the site, and offers a client program that reviewers claim allow you to search the net offline! Now who can cache the whole web offline? I think what they meant was without using a web browser.

I know of some good old search engines that emerged out of the middle-east, didnt test them well at the time. But the famous one was Ajeeb.com, and sadly it has scraped its search functionality, and now turning more into a fee based service.

Domino's Pizza Hotline down...

Who would have thought about it? Could the company hotline go down? Theoretically, ofcourse yes. But practically, I never encountered it. This is what happened to Domino's Pizza in Kuwait last Wednesday when their hotline stopped functioning for some reason, and being the type of take away pizza restaurants, this basically meant that they are out of customers for that day! Most people tend to call for delivery, so can you imagine the loss this failure have caused them?

The funny thing about it is that the company started taking some reverse engineering approach by calling its saved customer numbers asking whether they would like to order pizza or not :)

I wonder how could a company be prepared for such an incident, and whether there could be something like a backup server.