Johannesburg, 28 Nov 1997
The service, called ZA.Zoo, indexes several thousand SA web sites and is updated continuously. The 450-page on-line catalogue includes a daily "What`s new in the ZA.Zoo" service that features the latest SA web offerings, an extensive Africa section as well as selected international websites.
"We`ve put a lot of effort into developing a truly world-class web catalogue," says M-Web Interactive General Manager Bruce Cohen. "When we researched what was locally available, it became clear that current efforts are in many cases half-baked and riddled with dead links."
ZA.Zoo, says Cohen, combines the skills and resources of M-Web with those of the Electronic Mail & Guardian, in which M-Web recently acquired a controlling interest. "We`ve retained a full-time team of information specialists to develop and maintain ZA.Zoo as the authoritative database of the South African web. The team visits each and every site before evaluating, indexing and cross-indexing it."
The service has received the stamp of approval from Rhodes University`s New Media Laboratory (NML), which specialises in teaching computer-aided research and reporting. "ZA.Zoo offers a superb window into the South African web that is comprehensive, well organised and easy to navigate," says NML Director Roland Stanbridge. "Quality catalogues like ZA.Zoo are far more useful than search engines which mindlessly suck up and spew out data from the Net. ZA.Zoo will become an essential teaching tool at the NML and a very useful resource for journalists."
The catalogue is also key-word searchable using Verity search technology acquired by M-Web. "This is the Rolls Royce of search tools," says Cohen, "and it refreshes its database every evening to ensure that the latest information is included."
To further ensure the freshness of the catalogue, M-Web runs a "site-sweeper" through ZA.Zoo every night to weed out any dead links. "By combining the best technology with skilled professionals, we`re able to offer the country`s finest web catalogue," says Cohen. ZA.Zoo can be found at www.mweb.co.za
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