Vietnamese Google-killer searches like it's 1996 Google is facing another challenge to its dominance in Asia after home-grown Vietnamese search engine Wada launched with a mission to offer users there a more localised, intuitive alternative hat seems to borrow heavily from Yahoo!, circa 1996. The Mountain View giant has a huge lead in the Vietnamese search market, with …
Someone looks at it and makes a decision.
This sort of directory approach is far from definitive. It's just a collection of reasonably good sites that fall into certain categories as selected by someone. But as the article notes, for users "new to the internet" (they do turn up from time to time) it's a useful way to find a bunch sites you might be interested in. Otherwise an initial search for something like football can lead to decision fatigue.
If you can't travel back in time to Yahoo circa 1996 to try it out then have a look at the Open Directory
dmoz.org
Hm... if your market is those 20% of users that are new to the internet --- then surely you're going to quickly lose them? Either they decide tha interwebz is nothing for them so they go away, or after a few months they're not new to it anymore? What a strange business strategy.
I usually use Google to search for Vietnamese sources, even without using diacritical marks, with great success.
The problem is < www.alibaba.com > and when you go there it is presenting the whole spectrum of countries with China usually first, which isn't much use when you are sourcing in VietNam.
There is another web site I use for VN and that is < www.PanPages.com > which indexes suppliers both with and without web sites which is very beneficial since Vietnamese don't usually use the InterNet for sourcing. Often, to source something you have to use reverse and lateral techniques.
Even the countries largest supermarket, which has weekly paper-based promo's, doesn't up date it's web site every week.
For example, I needed to locate someone with a polycarbonate heating oven. I inquired of a polycarbonate wholesaler and learned from them the name of a polycarbonate manufacturer. Contacting the sales department, and explaining my dilemma, they gave me a few names of their customers who were volume purchasers. After contacting three, I located one with an oven of sufficient capacity.
I think Wada has a good chance of success as even manual sorting/categorising is cheap over here given the salaries paid.
I have a CNC shop offering laser and water jet cutting and we have recently gone to 24/7 operation as business is so good - all without a web presence - and I am a partner in a web site authoring company! We simply cannot handle more work without a new premises.
WADA filling a needed void!
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