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The big problem is -- how do you find them?

Many online directories such as Yahoo! now seem to take an eternity to publish new site listings. Of course this is probably little more than a cunning ploy to separate you from your hard-earned cash since you can get "priority" service by handing over a fist-full of money.

An increasing number of search engines, such as Google will list your site pretty quickly but won't rank it highly for quite some time.

Why is this?

Well, in an attempt to produce the most relevant results, these engines tend to rely on a site's "street-cred", something that is established in part, by the number of other sites that link to it.

Clearly, when you launch a new site it's not going to have a whole heap of other sites providing those links, so it will probably lurk well down the rankings compared to similar sites that are more widely referenced.

Readers Say (updated irregularly) SearchNZ... - Chris Geography vs Application... - Dominic searching for NZ sites... - Robert NZ Explorer... - Edwin About Accessnz & search nz... - Stuart Have Your Say

So where do you go to find out what's new on the Web?

Fortunately, some sites are smart enough to have a "New Listings" page, or the equivalent thereof.

Even Aardvark has its own New Sites on the NZ Web page where you can check out sites that have been recently added.

Other local search engines provide similar functions -- but it strikes me that there's something amiss with a few of them.

Take the New Sites page at SearchNZ for instance. As of this morning it was telling me that "there have been 0 new sites added... in the last 7 days". (Screendump)

No new sites in a week? Goodness me, have people stopped adding stuff to the NZ Web?

I don't think so -- but it sure looks as if AccessNZ have given up adding new sites to their web directory/search-engine.

As of this morning, the Pending Registrations page was advising that there were 2228 unprocessed registrations (Screendump) and they seem to date back to late March!

So what's the guts?

Has Google really established such a strangle-hold on the market that AccessNZ has just given up maintaining their database, and have site developers simply given up registering with other engines such as SearchNZ?

Maybe the local search engine marketplace is in collapse?

After all, the formerly quite useful SearchNow.co.nz engine is no-more and the domain now refers you to AltaVista.com.

All is not lost however. There are some sites such as NZPages which appear to be chugging along, with over 100 sites listed on their New Sites page over the last 10 days.

If AccessNZ aren't bothering to process new site listings any more then maybe they ought to tell people and if Google really has such a stranglehold on the market that people aren't bothering to list or search with local engines then why bother even being in the market?

I just wish that Google would add a "recent listings" or "sort by date" function to its database of web-pages though. That would make tracking down new additions to the web a much easier task.

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