It’s been 4 months since I last wrote about Rednano – the Singapore search engine which was launched 6 months ago. I just checked it traffic statistics at Alexa.com and Compete.com, the numbers show that Rednano is going nowhere.

Website Traffic Ranking by Alexa.com

Website Traffic Ranking by Compete.com

Look at the charts above.

The trend of Rednano.sg should be going up like AsiaOne.com, right?

After spending millions on the project, I think this is… never mind.

Maybe, it will be another ST701-like story – it will take a couple of revamps and more off-line advertising to ramp up the traffic. SPH is really loaded, you know. However, they don’t seem to learn quick enough.

So much for the chicken rice search, pie search and the the talk about “supplant the big names of Google and Yahoo as the prime tool for sourcing local information” as reported in the SPH owned The Straits Times on 10 Aug 2007.

Talk is cheap but search engines are not.

Singapore’s famous blogger Mr Miyagi said Rednano.sg “is a superfluous search engine” in his article, Rednano’s shepherd’s pie vs Google’s shepherd’s pie” and listed anecdoctal evidence to prove his view.

Rednano.sg is #1 Superfluous Search Engine

Google search results on superfluous search engine

Personally, I think Rednano.sg is just another decent search engine. It is still far from what SPH Search want to achieve as a local search engine for Singapore. And I think the way SPH Search is marketing Rednano.sg is really very naive.

1. Does SPH Search really understand how people use search engines?
2. Why did they think Singaporeans would want to search for PIE or chicken rice at Rednano.sg?
3. What is the real purpose of SPH building a search engine and directory?

Just Another Site for SPH to Sell Ad Space

Rednano.sg is destined to be a superfluous search engine as long as the developer’s number one priority is not to provide the best user experience but to sell more ad space.

Rednano Beta was launched yesterday according to a report in today’s Straits Times.

I think this new search engine by SPH Search is good news for Internet users and ideally will provide yet another option for us to search for relevant information on Singapore and… chicken rice.

Rednano Chicken Rice

Find out what Rednano had to do with Singapore chicken rice in this news report by none other than SPH owned Straits Times.

The Web search results are pretty good.

But the directory search results sux!

Go search for web hosting at the Rednano Directory and you will see all sort of computer services company listing but Web hosting company.

Btw, Rednano.sg was just indexed 25 minutes ago by Google and only the home page was indexed.