MY
BABY
by
TV Smith
24/06/05
Been
busy attending to my baby, the portal Malaysia
Central (MyCen) www.mycen.com.my
during the past couple of weeks. There was
a backlog of over two thousand submissions,
and I figured I should devote at least a couple
of weeks to shorten the queue. Why were there
so many submissions, you may be wondering?
Simple. Many Malaysians now know that searches
at major search engines for Malaysia-centric
stuff often yield MyCen at the top of the
results.
What started as a single page of
links to essential government bodies in 1998, has since evolved into Malaysia's
leading portal with over 30,000 unique users and 150,000 page views daily. That's
over millions of hits per day, if you must know. It has outlast and outperformed
several multi-million ringgit funded start-ups, along the way.
Its success
lies in its simple, no-ads, no-frills interface. Finding any establishment or
site is a couple of clicks away, since day one. While Mycen's own spider do crawl
around Malaysia's websphere, many of the listed sites are manually submitted and
checked. The organic (and exponential) growth in content and users require considerable
human supervision to ensure the listings are always relevant, accurate and updated.A
common misconception is that Mycen competes with spidering search engines like
Google. In reality, MyCen and Google co-exist happily, to the benefit of all listed
sites. Mycen's spider-friendly database becomes delicious fodder for Google Bot.
The number of searches originating from Google is phenomenal, resulting in a win-win-win-win
situation for all parties (MyCen-Google-Listed Sites-End Users).
Malaysia
Central is proud to be the only external resource linked from Malaysian government
Ministries, embassies, educational institutions, NGOs and industry web sites.
It is also chosen as the default information gateway on the intranet of several
leading local corporations and MNCs. I am also happy to note that an increasing
number of users now originate from mobile devices such as PDAs or smart phones
via GPRS, EDGE and 3G. One
of the primary attractions of MyCen is the inclusion of Malaysian sites or establishments
not found anywhere else. These sites were included based on user feedback and
through extensive research. While some webmasters are not bothered (for some reasons),
many sites fail to show up in Google due to inadequate SE optimisation or poorly
implemented design.
For such sites, an appearance at MyCen should result
in subsequent indexing by Google and other major engines. On the other hand, many
local organisations may never be found online at all, as they have no web sites
to begin with. MyCen takes such entities into account as part of the listings
include physical addresses, phone and fax numbers. Of
course, the quest to be all-encompassing is endless and the directory is currently
far from perfect. With this in mind, may I invite you to continue recommending
things you have come across and like to share. It can be a business entity, a
school or even your own blog. Please do a search first to confirm it is not already
listed. It probably is.
If you have submitted in the past and it
is still unlisted, please e-mail me and
I'll personally look into it. You can also
submit event announcements and press release
for immediate publication. As a webmaster
or blogger, you may be interested to know
that you can also add MyCen's search
panel to your site for free.
Nice examples: here,
here, here,
here, here,
here, here,
here, here,
here, here
Thank
you. End of plug. Regular programming here should resume next week.
Malaysia
Central (MyCen) www.mycen.com.my
©
2005 TV SMITH
Link to this article: http://www.tvsmith.net.my/duasen/240605_baby.html
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