GOOGLE DROPS SOUTH AFRICAN SEARCH ENGINE JONGA

Web users searching for South Africa's newest search engine Jonga onGoogle are more likely to find an Indian army 4x4, a South Africantour company or the genealogy of a German whose name is "Jonga". Thatis if they find it at all. 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 longerindexed by the world's biggest search engine."The interesting thing is that a lot of South African related searcheson Google were displaying results from Jonga's Web Directory and thusa lot of traffic was being forwarded from Google to Jonga's webdirectory and search," he says.Although the GoogleBot has sniffed around the website in the last week- visiting only one page each time - the results have not beenrecorded on Google's search index, says Carruthers."I did contact Google via the usual channels however I only receivedautomated responses which I did respond to and at this stage havereceived no feedback from them," he says.However, Carruthers says Jonga has yet to record a decline in traffic."Since Jonga was launched only a month ago its traffic has beengrowing on a daily basis and thus the effect of being removed fromGoogle's index hasn't adversely affected our traffic, however we domiss the referral traffic," he says.Jonga still features strongly on other search engines. Yahoo, MSN andAltaVista return the website in their top three results when searchingwith the term "Jonga". But even site-specific Google searches come upempty-handed.Jonga, which launched in December 2005, uses open source Apache Luceneas its text search backend. It features over26-million websites in its index and "at least 85 000 website domainsin the ZA or ZA related name-space", according to Carruthers.Google did not respond to Tectonic's request for comment.