Kiwi search engine to take on Google

Tauranga-based company aims to change the nature of internet searching.

By James Heffield / Saturday, November 28 2009

A new search engine developed in New Zealand is promising to provide internet users with a higher quality of information and website owners with a better means of monetising their online content.

The Pingar search engine, demonstrated in Auckland this week by Tauranga company Pingar, presents search results in a PDF document instead of listing links to external sites as Google or Bing does.

“It takes the browsing out of browsing,” Pingar managing director Peter Wren-Hilton said. “For example, if a user typed in ‘what investment opportunities exist in Wellington?’ they would probably get back a five page PDF document.”

The information in the PDF would be drawn from the websites of companies or individuals who had signed up, for free, to give Pingar access to their content. In return for signing on with Pingar the content owners would receive a cut of advertising revenue gathered from marketers that would pay to sponsor the engine's PDF result pages, Wren-Hilton said.

“It’s win – win really. No other search engine has adopted the same market entry model as us.”

Wren-Hilton said Pingar hoped to make the search engine available to internet users in Australasia, Europe and the US in the first quarter of 2010 and was hoping to have 10 million registered search users within 12 months of its public launch.

“I don’t think it will ever replace Google, but it will compliment it.”

The results PDFs would initially only support text and graphics like photos and graphs but Pingar was working with New Zealand and overseas universities to develop the capability to also present movie content in its search results, he said.