The company, which has been in beta phase over the past few months, has come under fire in the last few weeks for registering common misspellings of popular domain names like 'yahho.com.au'. Ansearch is willing to transfer the domain names of any company which protests, and has even publicly listed a free-call 1800 number for complaints. However, there has yet to be any interest.
"Nobody has approached Ansearch with respect to their domain yet," Ansearch CEO Dean Jones told ZDNet Australia . "It turned into a very interesting storm in a teacup."
The company is in discussions with .au Domain Administration (auDA), the body which administers domain names in Australia, to iron out the issue.
Jones said auDA's policy on misspellings of popular domain names needs to go through a testing process -- a process that has yet to take place.
He claimed the act of registering misspellings of popular domain names was common in the search engine industry. "You have a current situation where someone like a ninemsn will receive that traffic if we do not," he said. "So on a competitive level we at least needed to explore it."
The company has also unveiled a demographic searching feature which provides results that are particularly relevant to age and gender. Jones cited the example of those searching within the general category of real estate. "The younger end of the market view more rental property sites while older age groups tend to search for commercial or investment property," he said.
No tracking mechanism for users' search habits are currently in place but he said in future, through "toolbars and other methods", a visitor's demographic profile could be revealed.
He said Ansearch was not attempting to be "the library of the Internet" as competitor Google was. "In the short term," he said, "the nature of our engine is focusing very heavily on the commercial end of the market."
Ansearch was acquired by technology holding group Optum in September 2004.
I am not aware of any other search engine driving traffic by registering misspellings of popular domain names. Perhaps Mr Jones meant that such practices where common amongst spammers, scammers and those that compete in the competitive realms of gaming or porn?