Thanks for your question.
The name voelspriet.nl did ring a bell for me as a Dutch citizen, not
living the the Netherlands anymore, although it is not a search engine
I have used myself.
That represents a pattern. Voelspriet.nl is a relative newcomer, only
started in the year 2000, and is not leading in any of the statistics
I could find. That would perhaps also not be a good criterium, since
the most recent ranking I could find dates from the end of 2000.
In other ways voelspriet.nl could certainly be seen as at least a very
accepted search engine. When the US started bombing in Afghanistan a
leading Dutch daily like NRC Handelsblad mentioned Voelspriet.nl in
its overview of news sources, although it did have only a bottom
position.
Another Dutch national paper, AD nominated voelspriet.nl for its
webawards in 2002 (no results yet) and quoted its pround founding
father, the journalist Henk van Ess, who describes voelspriet.nl as
his private playing ground and as a "clean" way to do searches on the
Internet.
This articles also mentiones the only negative note I could find: one
of the jury members suggests that Voelspriet.nl might have illegally
used Google's technology. But the allegation is not substantiated and
I do not find any referral to this possible problem in any of the
other sources I have checked. Van Ess is really adoring Google, both
in the interview and on the site itself.
So, on your question: it is considered to be part of the widely
acknowledged media in the Netherlands, but that has not yet been
reflected in its rankings.
The rankings of website in the Netherlands:
http://www.zoekprof.nl/achtergronden/zoeksites.html
The article on the webawards nomination:
http://www.ad.nl/artikelen/InternetenPC/Webawards/1019538174898.html
The article on the US bombing in Afghanistan
http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/buitenland/1002521595069.html
Search strategy:
terms: voelspriet, rangorde, zoekmachine
Both at google.com and www.ilse.nl (a leading Dutch search engine :-) |
