THE most extensive online directory of products, brands and services in Bermuda and around the world is now available through a search engine recently launched by a local company.

The portal WhichBrand.com and its subordinate, www.pinkpages.bm, offer what no other search engine has been able to provide - precision results on one page.

The idea was born out of the repeated frustrations of its creators, local entrepreneur Robin Blackburne and American marketing executive Stephen Encarnaco.

The pair discovered that while engines such as Google and Alta Vista would yield pages of results, most were useless, shown because the searched-for item had a brief mention in the text. Official web sites of even major brand names, they found, would frequently not appear until the second, fourth or even 16th page of results.

"The WhichBrand project emerged because the Blackburne tennis racquet could not be found from a search for tennis racquets," said Mr. Blackburne, the majority shareholder and designer of the portal.

"We had enormous success with the racquet in the first two years and then had terrible trouble getting distribution. So we reverted, as everyone else did, to the Internet. We built a spectacular site but nobody was coming to it and we couldn't understand why."

A general search on tennis racquets revealed that neither their web site nor any of the industry majors - the Wilsons, the Princes, the Heads - were yielded in the first few pages. When the search was extended to the entire sporting goods industry, the result was the same.

"We extended the search beyond that," he said. "We looked for everything from desks to computers to aeroplanes to mascara and everything in between and none of the major brands could be found on the first two or three pages of any of the search engines.

"We realised it was a serious problem. We'd put in running shoes, for example, and get about a million results with none of the major brands shown on the first page. Can you imagine that Nike and Reebok - billion-dollar companies - aren't listed? It's incredible.

"So we built the portal on the basis that companies would pay to be listed on the first page. And we did this with every single product in the world."

Mr. Blackburne said they began with the aid of a relatively small portal building house in California, but switched to a firm in Toronto a year and a half into the project. Three years later, he is pleased with the result despite having panicked a bit at the onset.

"We don't deny that search engines are useful," said Mr. Blackburne. "But none of the big engine builders had an engine that worked in the functionality that we wanted to do what we were going to do.

"Some were good at one thing. Some were good at others. None had the perfect package. So we had to build the thing from scratch. I was very nervous because we started off with a totally empty database. There was nothing in it. Absolutely nothing.

"So we went into hundreds and hundreds of sites, found out what the categories (for their products) were, pooled the information, and built up our knowledge of the industry from there. We went from cars to computers to printers to watches and desks and every other thing you can think of.

"I am now probably the most informed person about products and brands in the entire world. It's taken us three years but we've got an absolutely spectacular search vehicle. We went through every single brand in every single product category. It was just a massive amount of work but well worth the result."

WhichBrand.com and www.pinkpages.bm went live at the end of July and, since then, have been getting around 50,000 hits a month. The differences between it and other search engines are vast:

Precision results on a single page.

Even with a very slow connection, results are instant.

Spelling need not be accurate.

Even vague product or service category descriptions are capable of leading the user to the desired product.

The URL always remains the same, making it easier to keep track of past pages. A simple click at the bottom takes users back to exactly where they were before.

Offers listings of telephone numbers from virtually every country around the world.

Mr. Blackburne said he extended the logic of WhichBrand.com to the local market - businesses, products and services. The Bermuda Pink Pages, accessible through www.pinkpages.bm, is the result.

"We built the engine and then decided to create a local Yellow Pages type project linking it with the massive power of the WhichBrand portal and the millions of brands and products it has. The (Bermuda Telephone Directory's) Yellow Pages have 483 pages. That's our competition, the hard copy of the yellow pages and we're just so superior.

"What people are doing is putting the Pink Pages up in a corner of their computer and leaving it open all day and just going in and referring to it. It's much quicker (than finding something in the Yellow Pages).

"If you look up Bermuda attorneys in the Yellow Pages, for example, there's nothing. If you look up solicitors, there's nothing. You place either of those in the product or services category in the Pink Pages and in two seconds you've got a complete listing.

"You can go straight into their sites, the telephone number is right on the page. Their e-mail address is there and it's the same for all the major industries in Bermuda.

"All the results incredibly focused. So what you can do if you're looking for a car locally you can check on the model if you want and then can go right into the (model's site) and check out the car there. You can discover who's representing them, find their phone number, send an e-mail.

"You can go in and do your homework, decide what car you want, and go to the local distributor for a test drive of that car or get it brought in for you."