I have been using www.anzwers.com.au as my main search engine for the last couple of days and it has been an interesting experience. I must admit, it did take a little getting used to (not going to Google or Yahoo straight away) but after a couple of days using another engine for my primary searches, it seems fairly natural.
Anzwers have kept their UI (define) very clean, having the search box in the middle of the page and their directory headings down the left hand side. They have a funky little feature under the search box that allows you to search for homes, cars, jobs or holidays.
It seems they aggregate data from the most popular search terms and sites and list these in an order of popularity. This I think tends to add to a sheep mentality keeping the big boys big and the smaller companies on page 5478. They don’t offer any widget’s like a toolbar so I had to add them as my homepage which was kind of annoying, but I got over it after a couple of days.
One very strange aspect of the site is that they only show news, image and local search tabs after you go to one of the genre search tabs mentioned above. Personally I think it makes sense to offer these facilities on your homepage. I say this because I found this facility only after three days of using this engine.
Even stranger is that these facilities are on a subsidiary engine of Anzwers called Ansearch. It seems a little strange to me that they don’t just integrate the two engines into one clean, easy-to-use system.
One thing I did notice about Anzwers homepage is that some of the links do not work. I clicked on the ‘advertise with us’ link and it bounced me back to the homepage. Call me crazy but I don’t think it’s a great idea to not let people find out about your advertising programs.
I thought Anzwers was a bit slow (especially when compared to the likes of Google and Yahoo) to bring up their serps (define) and their Australian results brought back more relevant results than their international results.
All in all Anzwers is a good engine for Australian searches but I would go somewhere else for international results.
Update – I wrote to Anzwers asking them to conduct an interview with me about where they are heading in the future but I haven’t heard anything back from them. Will let you know if I hear anything.
