If there’s one thing football fans hate more than anything else, it’s trying to search for a football related article on Google. If you’re like most people around the world, you’ve realised that Google is a little biased towards a certain brand of football — and it’s not the kind that’s played with your feet.
American football by far outweighs the number of football related searches on the internet. In all honesty, it’s not surprising given the fact that Google was born and is currently based in the United States. The thought of having more searches for a sport that dominates their landscape makes sense. But what about all those fans of the beautiful game that want to find a specific story about Steven Gerrard’s goal against Olympiakos in the 2004/05 Champions League?
That’s where Footballrama.com comes into the picture.
Footballrama is building search engines designed with the football fan in mind. The club themed search engines (currently they have homepages for ten different Premier League teams) are powered by Google but come with a unique twist.
Unlike an average Google search, Footballrama.com puts football first by altering the search algorithm itself to deliver much more accurate results when searching for information or news surrounding your club.
For instance, if searched for “Rafa” in Google, you’ll get links to Rafa Nadal and a load of other stuff unrelated to football let alone Rafa Benitez. But if you search for “Rafa” on Footballrama’s Liverpool search engine (Liveroo.com) it immediately delivers only results relevant to the Liverpool boss. There may be the odd link out of place here and there, but if you compare any results to the same search on Google you will see a major improvement.
However, if you search for general topics unrelated to football, Footballrama’s search engine delivers regular Google results. For example, if you search for “flats for rent in London,” the search engine delivers information on exactly that. I’ve been using the search engine for the last couple of weeks and officially made the Liverpool search page my go-to.
As with any search engine, the algorithm must be improved and tweaked constantly and the guys at Footballrama have told me they are doing just that. So it should only get better.
Footballrama currently has search engines for 10 different Premier League teams, and I’m told they have 4 more about to be launched and more to come after that (including some lower league clubs). So if you’re a Liverpool fan, just set your homepage to Liveroo.com and you’re set! If you’re a Tottenham (are there many of them?), Footballrama has a search engine for you, too. Each homepage is extremely clean and includes famous quotes and some great fan-photos that are pulled straight from Flickr.
People have tried to do football related search engines in the past but have failed miserably with the search algorithm. This is the first one I’ve seen that’s been geared to search for football articles that fans care about. It’s a thing of beauty when you try it out for the first time!
