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I did a couple of post on rednano, SPH’s Singapore first local search engine. And honestly, I did not use that for any of my search so far as required for my work, or leisure for that matter. But as we know, it is tax filing season and hence I will give rednano a shot and there are the results for some key terms:

Generally not good. Not easy to find the IRAS link on the first page from what I see. From this, I suspect that “seasonal” search will not really do well in rednano. But again I will suspect that other seasonal search that SPH can cash in might do better, for example Christmas shoppiong or GSS. And speaking of which, rednano does the search real bad for GSS. Great Singapore Sale dude!

But I side tracked. Back to the purpose of the post.

Firstly, someone submitted to KillerStartups a entry on rednano.  And (part of) the entry reads:

Rednano is a joint venture between two media powerhouses: The Singapore Press Holdings Group Ltd and Schibsted ASA. Both companies have a proven track record for providing timely information in a relevant context.

Two media powerhouses? I leave that to the reader’s imagination. And according to Killerstartups:

Why it might be a Killer:

Rednano should catch on in Singapore rapidly as it appears to give much better results than Google with a more extensive array of options. The “people” and “directory” categories will serve as a more efficient Yellow Pages.

Some Questions:

Will they be able to sway people away from using Google? They probably have a good chance of doing this in Singapore itself but it might take considerably longer for international searches about Singapore to occur on Rednano instead of on the ubiquitous Google engine.

But it is good that they are featured on KillerStartups.  Ablewise Online Classifieds, which I coded for was also featured on Killerstartups.

Secondly, Benjamin Koe (whom I do never met) did an interview with Paul Jensen of SPH search.

To summarise, I will gather some important points of the questions asked:

In Paul’s words (or as pre-determinded by the PR/marketing department), he described Rednano as:

According to Paul, Rednano.sg is the flagship product of SPH Search and can be thought of as SPH 3.0. If you consider 1.0 the days of print, 2.0 Straits Times Interactive, then local federated search as a means of content discovery and delivery is 3.0. And it involves aggregating content that’s beyond the gates of SPH!

Sounds pretty much up to times and trendy.

Following on, this statement caught my attention and I think the Government should seriously get the management behind Rednano to join them:

Paul carries on to explain that the purpose of Rednano.sg is to “define” algorithmically what it means to be Singaporean.

You are not kidding me? While the Government are doing their best to define the Singapore identity with the mass influx of foreign talent, Rednano is “defining algorithmically” what it means to be Singaporean. Okay, jokes aside, lets move on.

Paul said something on Citizen journalism.

He also says that models such as OhMyNews are fantastic, but will not work in an organization such as SPH because it is too high risk for a public listed company to defend citizen journalists in court when required.

Is it strange that SPH’s papers encourage the people to submit pictures and breaking news to them? Does this not count as Citizen Journalism? And to the many citizen out there who are posting news and submitting pictures to the local media company, you are on your own.

Mr Koe then asked the million dollar question: Does Rednano.sg compete with Google.com.sg?

And the answer:

The short answer is no. No because Rednano.sg has access to sources that Google doesn’t such as the Straits Times archives and other sources of photos and maps and people directory that is built in house. Google takes whatever’s on the public Internet, Rednano.sg does that too (apparently with more relevance to Singaporeans) plus much more.

From this simple statement, I guess it sums up the mentality of Rednano when it comes to search. The impression is that “in house” information are better than other found in the open web. I cannot help but to feel that way.

And it comes to the my next question, if Google cannot access such “sources”, then does the public have free access to such “sources”? Even if the content is in house, and especially those in Straits Times archives, are they freely available for access by the public? I do know Straits Times online archives are not freely accessible by the public. Wonder how does that affect the search results?

Now imagine users are looking at breaking news report, and users know that SPH print news are not freely accessible online as only those who paid twice subscribers are allow to access “printed” news online (oxymoronic I know but I cannot find a better term), does the users try their luck on Rednano? Or they go elsewhere?

To round off, Google seems to spider CNA sites a lot and more often than not, Google results points to CNA pages when I am serach for news reports.

That is all for this update!