Typical beach lovers spend their summers swimming away on exotic beaches dotting the globe, talk of the Caribbean, Seychelles the list goes ……. What populations of sand that lie under one’s feet are in their billions, it will take an awesomely nerve wracking effort to contemplate performing a count given the numbers and sheer sizes. So is the nightmarish state of web search business in East Africa

Laying Seacom cable
Arrival of the information superhighway substantiated the efforts of an aura of e-marketing projects for the myriad of companies seeking to metamorphose into regional-global giant. East Africa has been the “last man standing” out of the stiffest battles on savvy web presence. Now that the new international fiber optic cable is here, its been subject to all forms of speculation, belief to benefit many from exploits in Tele- medicine, to cheaper research alternatives, to varied long distance educational programmes, why not anticipate binning the likes of DSTV for a much affordable yet flexible European online soccer subscriptions, courtesy of HDTV (high definition television).One could watch European soccer matches of choice online without a glitch, thanks to fiber technology.

Business here seems to be in the doldrums of a content revolution at a larger scale. Web portals with sketchy, homogeneous and sometimes dodgy information gross many an online space for most of East Africa. Lots of content imported, less and less likely literature on local forms of information available by indigenous firms.

Take an example if Am in Asia wanting to find some vital information on a kind of Beatle that ravages say potato crops in Uganda, I will happen to log into preferably Google search. It’s with utter disbelief that the information generated will detail the particular beetle’s American cousin.

There is less information posted on the web by local universities and information companies to suit what people look for. For the most part a bigger number of the Google, yahoo and most lately Bing search returns will be local researches done by organizations oversees.

This leaves us in an awkwardly tricky position that we can’t afford to push our online brands out there. Search business capitalizes on using the crawler technology looking out for the most richly organized information endowed sites, say on some topic. When the search results are up, only those with the right detailed information will feature in the results.

Searching into our local pages offers not so many good choices and so rarely features easily in a world wide search on East African local content. It’s like walking into Mandela National stadium filled with brochures of different companies, figuring out which one is worth picking as all have the same sketchy, stereotyped information will augment a nightmare. One could spend eternity to find the right info.

To properly harness the newer technology attributes in terms of search, business referrals, AD placement to size with the global barometer, many businesses need to afford as much local original content generation. This will automatically translate to bigger sales as international traffic increases.

A mere goggling will generate hundreds of leads to a “rich” site .East African goods and services will get a bigger footing preferably through easier and cheaper online Branding drives, an army of researchers will have to be recruited to satisfy the voluptuous demand for more searchable material. What a shot in the arm for the not so usual research based organizations. The next generation of high paying remedies could be hibernating in cyberspace.