The company is customising its existing search engine for those markets, and has made beta versions of the overseas versions available online. Ansearch chief executive Dean Jones told ZDNet Australia his company planned go live with the engines in the second half of 2005 and establish a sales force in the US by early 2006.
Jones said he did not regard Ansearch as a competitor to search heavyweights Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. Rather, he planned to establish his company as a second-tier player similar to Ask Jeeves, which has long sat in the shadow of the top three.
The country-specific search engines are being complemented by a multitude of niche engines servicing relatively small communities of common interest.
Ansearch is already pursuing that strategy in the Australian market with specialist sites such as beccartwright.com.au, which bills itself as a directory where fans can find everything they need to know about the soap star and fiancée of tennis star Lleyton Hewitt. Another example is qbfm.com.au, a "local suburb search for Queensland and Brisbane".
The company also recently launched phonebook.com.au, a directory aimed at helping users search for local businesses. Although the service competes with a similar offering from Yahoo and in fact uses the same directory data sourced from vendor Australian Local Search, Jones is upbeat about the prospects for the service.
"We are confident that phonebook.com.au will become one of the leaders in the online directory space," he said, citing the memorable domain name as a potential advantage.
Ansearch plans to make money from the new site by giving businesses the option to enhance their basic free listings for a small fee.
Jones denied Ansearch was involved in porntal.com.au, a local adult content site which had initially appeared to utilise Ansearch search technology.
He acknowledged he owned the domain name and was a minor partner in the project, which bills itself as "a search engine specifically catering to the needs of those looking for adult content."
Jones said while Ansearch would consider launching an adult brand at some point in the future, such a decision would be a long way off. "Porntal has nothing to do with Ansearch," he said.
News of Ansearch's expansion came as the .au domain regulator (auDA) confiscated more than 1,000 domains from the company last week. Although Ansearch had registered the unused domains for the purpose of driving traffic back to its search engine, the regulator did not agree this was a legitimate business interest under domestic regulations.
