Bro i am a big fan of taking risk trying and pursing what you think is right but here in Naija, like @shegsadeour government not democracy does not have the expertise either as advisers, or as decision makers to ban any international internet services in Nigeria so as to grow startups in Nigeria, which is main foundation of large startup growth e.g yandex, alibaba group, baidu.
If i was to advice if this kind of search engine has to work you have to be language specific apart from pidgin, those languages in Nigeria that is not part of the 3 major languages like ibibio, efik, ijaw that is what google is not offering.
I have a perfectly working version of what youâre talking about. Deployed it in 2014, and had it running for like 5 months. Had to shut down because of the amount of server space and speed required to keep it running.
Was spending like $199 monthly on server back then.
We are very aware about system resources, we would try to reduce loopholes like iterations that consume system resources, execute crawling and indexing at night/weekends and convert images into base64 etc.
So many donât do it here. If we donât have our own search engine, mail service provider and co forever because the US is too big for us what kind of tech eco-system will ours be? I donât want to suggest before it will look like I am hating some Nigerian products.
I think China and Russiaâs weird (to American Google) characters helped local competition perform better.
Weâd have a better chance if we start with indexing content we produce: Entertainment (News, Music and Video), and perhaps something to do with Religion.
If on the other hand, you start with indexing stuff Google is great at⌠say academic papers, Hollywood movies, items in international markets⌠then, youâll know that people in their search for value are hardly patriotic.
My point about democracy is that for example Buhari canât just wake up one day and say âalright, Nigerians, Facebook and Twitter are bannedâ. It will not work. China is a communist country, the government controls everything and yes, good point about them also being far more technologically advanced. Russia is a fake democracy thatâs more like a fascist nation. Putin controls everything. Turkey is also like Russia in the sense of a fake democracy. Obviously we still have our chronic corruption problems in Nigeria but there are some basic facets of democracy that still work here.
You canât just ban Nigerians from websites that are part of everyday life of the vast majority of Nigerians (like Facebook and Google) and not expect blow back. And as you rightly pointed out, they donât have the technical know how to foster a local clone anyway. So this in many ways is an extremely long shot even though it looks good on paper.
Goliath was 9 foot. Most of the other Israelite soldiers were 8 or 7 foot. Instead it was a 5 foot boy that defeated him. Stop listening to all the other 7 foot giants that are too chicken to do it and get it done.
Iâm all in for taking risks and going against the odds, but that doesnât mean you should keep your head in clouds.
A lot of what people are pointing out are just the realities of building something like this. Theyâre not targeted at discouraging you.
I for one believe building a product (especially online) just because you want to have a Nigerian version is a terrible way of going about reasoning your startup. This is not Agriculture, or Fabric making (people wonât have to pay import duties just to use your american competitors)
You need a niche, something unique to you, something only your company would be good at. Entrepreneurs canât just keep saying - use my product cause its Nigerian - it might work for others but its much difficult to replicate online.
Like I pointed out. Nigerians use google heavily. Google didnât achieve that status in a year, so even if youâre gonna build a clone, its gonna take a while and itâs gonna be expensive - both in resources and capital.
Now assuming you have viable MVP. Youâd still have to maintain it. Lemme pause here first. I donât want to get into resources expended in running a product like this.
You see youâre not the only one who has thought of doing something like this, but Iâve long realized that just cause I want something to succeed so badly doesnât mean it will.
if you can find a way to make your product unique or add a feature even a company like Google will find difficult to replicate, then Iâm sure youâll get more positive reviews. Then youâll understand why I said:
btw this is what I expect your enthusiast to do. All these âgreatness, changing the worldâ talk isnât going to cut it realistically.
Meditate on your idea and find what you can do to make it standout, then we can start talking about reasonable ways to approach building it.
For one you might consider crawling only Nigerian sites (i.e. sites with the .ng, or .com.ng extension) on the fly and not indexing everything on the web as google is doing. You might consider manually indexing certain popular sites or asking site owners to register with you or add a custom tag that allows your robot identify that it is a Nigerian site to be indexed. You might consider not going more than 2-3 levels deep when indexing. For a site like this: forget PHP. You might consider python (which is also slow) but has a great crawling library, but since youâre going to be doing it on the fly a lot youâll probably need a compiled language like Golang, C, Java etc. You can then find ways to index popular searches.
My point is: Its not just about saying China has baidu, lets make a Nigerian version. How has that logic panned out for our numerous e-commerce startups.
To the enthusiasts: We cannot be living on extremes where we either too scared to do anything or we jump into everything without thinking it through.
They donât understand the statement of the problem, thatâs why most of them are seeing it that way.
We are not saying people should stop using google neither saying Buhari should ban Google but what weâre proposing is to have our own search engine, so as to be able to prioritize our local contents.
Iâm very happy most of us here are Tech Person, so i will like to highlight some examples
We have 1000+ programming languages? Yes
Do they ban one from another? No
But every programming language has its own purpose? Yes
Java doesnât disturb C# and Xamarin doesnât stop Phonegap from continuity for cross platform because each of them has its own unique purpose and view with different statement of the problem⌠Though they have common purpose which is cross platform but when you like HTML, CSS, Javascript and you donât know C# then you can develop mobile app with phonegap and youâre still a mobile app developer.
In summary, what am trying to bring out is that⌠Nigeria search engine doesnât disturb or stop another search engine, except if C# is stopping Java and Xamarin is stopping Phonegap.
Guys, donât be afraid, so far google people are human being and we have the same brain and they were not from heaven, so we can do it⌠Lets grow NigeriaâŚ
ThanksâŚ
Starting a business requires money, starting an online platform requires content, Growing it requires both, we understand these requirements and we want to give it a shot.
We are not Anti-Google, We are not Google rivals, do we even have the strength to think about it? we are not praying nor hoping that the Government should ban Google, we are just naij.com version of cnn.com.
Seems you read our minds, most people dont understand our stand.
Variety is a spice of life:
Why does our Daddy way back send us to buy Tribune and Punch newspapers?
Why do you go to techpoint.com and still active on radar.techcabal.com?
We are confident that if we get the servers calm, the content right and the algorithm running smoothly WE WILL SCALE.
Design, Code, Build and Deploy a search engine platform from scratch but strictly for Nigerian based websites/local contents.
Problem Statement:
The algorithm Google use for featuring results on SERP does not favour local content and the cost for Google Adword is not affordable for SMEâs/Start-ups in Nigeria.
Aims & Objectives:
To have a platform that understand when I search âhow to start a cassava farmâ will give me business advices on Nigerian context and not from foreign websites.
Secondly will be affordable for small businesses, startups and ecommerce portals to advertise on.
Thirdly crawl and index local information like sports, news, events, entertainment history etc.
Significance of the Project:
a. We want to have a search engine with localised content
b. Give competitive edge during Search Engine Campaigns (currency disparity)
c. We are not building language versions, as most people pointed out because Google does not have proper functionality in our local languages, NO. Our core MVPâs are stated above, itâs only an additional feature as we progress.
Conclusion:
We are positive it will scale.
First we will try to identify the number of registers domain names in Nigeria or for Nigeria.
We will strive to have at least 50% of these url crawled and indexed
We will schedule routing re-crawling and indexing every 7 days and possibly at night.
We will build 3 broad algorithms,
harvest urls
crawling routine
listing routine
When we gain traction we will build more algorithms that will handle Ads and user campaign management.
We will crawl and index all websites in all major domains such as online newspapers, hosting companies, news portals, listings, Nairaland, vconnect and so on that have Nigerian addresses on them.
No doubts, our present nameless escapade requires massive content in the billions of bytes and we know itâs a huge task, but a journey of a thousand miles starts with a step, Facebook user experience in 2008 is not as rich as 5 years ago and not as rich as today.
Our target is to keep crawling, keep indexing and keep uploading content, my medical student friends in university days calls their MBBS 300Levels exams Mountainous Barrier But Surmountable.
@Shoguns2001, pay no mind to the naysayers. Whether it succeeds or not, do what you feel like doing.
Iâll be interested in contributing my small knowledge if the need arises.
