Seekport, the innovative European search engine company, has successfully completed the Beta phase testing of its UK-specific www.seekport.co.uk search engine. Initially launched in December 2004, Seekport’s search engine delivers significantly higher hit quality than traditional US-oriented search offerings, typically returning UK-relevant content from nine out of every ten searches. This contrasts significantly with the ‘three out of ten’ performance from US search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.

Seekport differentiates itself from other search engines by backing its technology with a unique index team approach, that supplements its automated search capability with a local indexing team insuring the quality of its results. Seekport has built-up its London-based quality team during its Beta testing phase, preparing and constantly refining its local search indexes to return search results that are distinguished by a lower rate of spam, aggressive shopping sites, aggregator pages, Internet auctions and unwanted pornographic or offensive material.

“During our Beta testing phase we’ve again proved the concept of our unique local quality team approach. Our Seekport UK index team has been busy excluding spam and adding country-specific content to the Seekport search engine,” commented Seekport Internet Technologies’ Managing Director Joachim Kreibich. “Having a local quality team means that Seekport can respond quickly to pressing problems such as requests to block spam or remove any material that’s unsuitable for our UK search index. For users this is a key issue, particularly as deletion requests from US search vendors typically have to be routed back through the US and it can take very long time for anything to happen – if something happens at all.

“During the last few months we’ve also successfully validated the requirement for a high quality search engine for users looking for a safer, spam-free search,” continued Mr. Kreibich. “We’ve recently seen the US search engine vendors introducing increasingly complex, non-core services such as satellite mapping and price comparison engines – which are of course exciting. However these extras do little to add value to users’ primary search engine requirements which are returning safe, relevant searches. With www.seekport.co.uk we’re committed to delivering on that goal, and as we move out of our successful Beta phase we’re sending a clear signal to the market that there is now a real alternative when it comes to quality local searches.”

The end of Beta stage follows a number of key developments for Seekport in the UK including the recent launch of Seekbot – a new tool for webmasters. Seekbot checks in seconds how well or how badly a website is analysed by the crawlers of commonly used search engines, and how well it is prepared for a good placement in the search engine results. Earlier this month, Seekport also announced the addition of a new ‘Site-Preview’ capability that allows users to quickly identify whether a search result has the right contents before loading it.