New South African search engine Funnel has denied rumours that it has intentionally been blocking search results containing sites such as news24.com.
It is alleged that because Funnel is partly owned by IOL sales and marketing director Leon Lategan, it blocks its rival news24.com in search results.
However, Funnel MD Gideon Galloway says it is hard to restrict the Funnel search to only South African Internet Protocol addresses because "South African IP ranges are all over the place".
Therefore the Funnel search function is restricted to the .za domain, which is the reason that sites such as news24.com are not showing up in search results, adds Galloway.
The South African .com sites have to be manually added to the Funnel Web crawler, and news24, along with other sites like kulula.com, were put in on Friday, says Galloway.
It will take around two weeks before the effects are seen, he adds.
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Funnelling search results
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