Search.ch

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search.ch is a search engine and web portal for Switzerland. It was founded in 1995 by Rudolf Räber and Bernhard Seefeld as a regional search engine. In the following years many other services were added, such as a phonebook in 1999, a free SMS service in 2000 (now reduced to only one free SMS per week). In May 2004 search.ch was acquired by the Swiss Post.^{[citation needed]}

Today, search.ch is the second most popular search engine and most popular phonebook in Switzerland.^{[citation needed]}According the WEMF COMIS 2003 it has about 1.3 mio users at home and at work (about 50% of the then active internet population of Switzerland). According to the same study, search.ch is the second most popular site in Switzerland. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, which only studies home users in Switzerland, it is the fifth most popular site.^{[citation needed]}

The search technology is home grown. The user can restrict his search to regions of Switzerland, such as a canton or a city. The web crawler looks only at sites in the .ch and .li top-level domains and a number of automatically and manually updated list of Swiss websites on other domains. The index is updated weekly.