The RedZee Search Engine

RedZee.com came to be in 2002 and since then has gained an online presence.  Its Alexa ranking is respectable and its logo is top notch.  The perky red zebra is something that stayed with me long after I left the site. 

RedZee first came to my attention a short time ago when I received a call from their marketing branch.  Yes another telemarketing call but I will say the person on the other end of the line was professional and knowledgeable.  I had a couple minutes so he took me through a demo of the site.  

My first impression was positive as I love the landing page design and the mascot.  

The search results are returned in a very visually appealing way with thumbnails that scroll across your screen which you control with your cursor.  The nice thing about the thumbnails is they give you a glimpse of the site before you go there which can help save you time in finding the right website.  This may cause load time problems for surfers that do not have a high speed connection. 

Another feature of the site is something that parents will love.  Go to Red Zee and just try to search for porn.  I dare you.  Red Zee has filters in place to ban searches that are not “family friendly” and will not return any results.  Try that same search on Google and you will get in the neighborhood of 237 million results (which is the reason for no linky-linky to it here). 

Now everyone will have their own view of those filters.  Some may cry censorship and others may think it is long overdue.  Those of us with children who are surfing the internet like mine usually fall into that second category. 

There is a thing or two that I don’t necessarily like about the search engine.  It stems from the reason they called me.  They wanted to sell me placement in search results. 

For a fee I could be in the top three websites returned for a given search term.  To me this means the search results are not so much a reflection of the merit of the site as a reflection of the thickness of the site owner’s wallet.  To me this really diminishes the value and relevance of the search results displayed to those using the RedZee. 

Another disturbing thing about those top three results is that they are in no way identified as sponsored links.  So while a searcher perceives the top results reflect relevancy to the search term, they usually reflect something else which calls into question the credibility of the results. 

This is just intended to briefly bring RedZee to your attention.  Overall I would say that it is worth paying a visit to RedZee and just form your own impressions about it.  If you have children you may want to stear them away from other search engines and over to RedZee because of the family friendly content filters.

Personally I will not be consistently using it for search because of the way they display the top three sponsored results, but my daughter is a whole other story…