France’s Orange Alt: Le Moteur (The Engine)
Orange has just launched a new Alternative Search Engine.
The GUI is somewhat different compared to what we are used to seeing, but it is just a question of look & feel. The technology behind it seems to be www.voila.fr.
Here are some features:
* One billion documents indexed,
* 50 new technological components have been added which
increase general performance (more relevant summaries, responses
linked to news, etc),
* Speed of search improved: 10 times more rapid than previously,
* New functions improving usability like display of the results
with an icon or intuitive keywords (tags?),
* Some content displayed for some specific keywords. For example,
if you type “TV” you will get the evening TV program/grid,
* Presence of a tool bar that seems to have enhanced functions
(did not see it during the test): automatic updating, permanent
(search?) form and login possibility for Orange’s customers.
* Content: websites with no distinction, images, news, directory
search (like yellow pages), shopping, hotels, travel, etc.
In my opinion there is nothing really new or innovative here. I have the feeling that Orange launched this search engine in order to capture the users within its own web ecosystem. Every action is done so that
the user gets trapped within Orange’s world. There is a mix of Google Ads and own advertising.
Orange is the telco distribution Apple’s iPhone in France. They have a huge marketing capacity. I guess “Lemoteur” (”the engine”) can rapidly rank within the three to five search engines used in France.
Orange’s Lemoteur is an avatar of the incumbent Voila.fr search engine. “Voilà” was one of the top search systems in the 2001’s in France, before the Odramatic upcoming of GOOG. Now it’s the 4th or 5th. It used to be NOT alternative at that time… But, now, every search that is not Google, Yahoo or MSN (>95% market share here) can be considered as an “alt”.
My opinion is that Lemoteur deserves to be cited in ASE, especially because of it’s weird and courageous black interface, which I admit is rather a cosmetic feature. This opens a perspective to new heterodoxal look & feel in the search industry that are different than the Google-like puristic interfaces you often mention in your posts.
Cheers,
Henrick
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