New Bulgarian search engine gaining visibility

Jabse is the name of the new player in search in Bulgaria. In a market, dominated entirely by Google (over 90% if you compare it to pure search engines) this new entry looks like a very brave move. The previous attempts have achieved little and are agonizing.

However, Jabse, a one-man project, has now 2500 unique visitors and over 8000 impressions a day. This may not seem as a big deal of traffic but given the internet penetration in Bulgaria these numbers mean that the project has some potenital.

Jabse is only indexing sites in Bulgarian and has an index of 3,150,992 pages – far more than the two true Bulgarian search engines before it. Its indexing algorithms are somewhat crude and the SERP building algorithms also need a lot of improvement in order to become truly relevant. Still it has some features that put it immediately ahead previous such projects:

– handling .PDF files
– handling .DOC files
– following

type links (links, embeded in images)
– it has access to websites that are visible only from Bulgaria
and it is said to handle specific language related issues better than other search engines.

Jabse image search is still a project, but the author said it is soon to enter development stage.

No monetarizing method has been used in the search engine so far and there are no official statements from the owner about the way Jabse will make money in the future.

My personal concern about this project comes from the unknown amount of traffic it recieves from Google right now. Pages from Jabse are allowed to be indexed by search engine robots, Google included. If the number of visitors coming from Google is high, then it is relying on its nearest competitor for traffic! On the other side, if the numbers are low then this project might really have a future!