Search engine Sesam launched today. Some first impressions:

• News search: All news searches are welcome, it helps toiling journalists (and bloggers). But Sesam’s is very incomplete, and so far Kvasir’s is still better (of course: Sesam owner Schibsted used to believe in search and catalogues, and owned Kvasir for many years until it was sold off to Eniro, now one of Sesam’s toughest competitors…) Above all, the trumpeted newspaper archive search, which opens up some of the Invisible Web, delivers confusing results. I find no pattern – why are these articles included and not others? I understand why the papers in the archive don’t make everything available, but what Sesam could have done is to show all hits in the archive, and then restrict access to the story to paying customers only.
• Business search: This is a good feature: Company information has been connected with a map service. Excellent.
• General search:: Is Sesam a worthy Google competitor? Doubtful. Sesam’s niche must be Norway (and soon Scandinavia?). But then Sesam must deliver much better Norwegian results than Google. So far I’m not convinced. Example: Consider the results when you search for Jens Stoltenberg (Google) and Jens Stoltenberg (Sesam), both searches restricted to Norwegian pages. Sesam delivers very funny, but hardly useful results. The first is a pdf file about a forestry seminar (!) one year ago, in the second our prime minister declares that “rally is important” (!!). Google delivers mostly very relevant results, number one is his party’s presentation of him.

Other first impressions:

• Teknomedia
• Brosjan
• Eirik Newth
• Jo Christian Oterhals – very thorough from a former Sesam employee.