So there’s a new search engine that’s started in Southern Africa, for Southern African web sites. I first became aware of this search engine when I noticed it’s UserAgent in my sites logs, This was in June of 2010, Visiting the site I was pleasantly surprised and after what I had read on the few pages available, I figured it could be a great search engine, when completed.

When Completed? Yes. At the time the site claimed “Coming soon”. I left it at and carried on with life and my site development, however the name always stayed in the back of my mind, and of course I added it to my Search engine list on the Visitor tracking module on my site. Where I could keep an eye on how often the Search engines visit each page.

Recently I decided to actually look up what’s going on with Zen SA on my site, Looking at logs it appeared that the Zen Bot spent little more than a month feeling out all the content on my site (most from the Sitemap that I submitted) and then stopped. For at least the last six months there has been no activity from this bot on my site, and in the last 6 months almost all the visible content has changed.

Running a forum and Blog site, Six months is a life time. All the Forum posts from six months ago, by default, are not listed as active in the forum and are only visible via a link or by choosing to show older posts (I’m a member of several forums where it’s 10 days active by default . Blog entries (even though not regular on this site) have been added and are more relevant than what was here previously.

So I looked up Zen’s Domain history a little, and found out that it was first registered in September 2008 via Datacon.co.za, And Datacon was registered in February 2008 via Zen.co.za. ??? Wait, that’s a little confusing! I know. However that is about all I could find on Zen. So I looked at Datacon, and there website has even less than Zen’s... the only text there is “enterprise PostgreSQL solutions, enterprise system consulting, linux clusters” and of course an Email address.

Looking into the Site’s server itself we find that Datacon is on a shared hosting server belonging to Metroweb Connection, with a hundred or so sites on the same server... However the Zen site appears to be hosted on a dedicated server, also belonging to Metroweb. And the Zen bot crawls from a neighboring IP that has no record of sites.

Looking at the big picture there are a few abnormalities however it does look like it could be a legit venture, but one question still stands in my head. WHY SO LONG? What is happening with the coders that there isn’t even a pre beta search box available on the site, so that one can start testing out there engine?