Zenbu.com.nz - New Zealand's Local Search Engine

If you are in New Zealand and you need to find the closest video store or Chinese Delivery or take out, log onto to Zenbu.com and use its special "Find Nearest" search feature where you can type in the town or zip code that you are in and what place you are looking for and it will spit out the results for you quickly. Zenbu operates a bit like Wikipedia in the sense that it is open source and anyone can log in and edit pages and contibute information to the search engine. The word Zenbu was chosen as the name of the site because Zenbu is the Japanese word for everything, and everything in New Zealand can be found on the site, and they are hoping that it can soon be used as a noun and a verb in the sense that google was incorporated into the English language. For instance, the other day I was looking for a good Armenian restaurant nearby, so I "zenbu'd" the nearest one.

Zenbu is an open directory of New Zealand places, products and services. Open means that any registered user can add, edit or export data. All the information in Zenbu is usable copyright free under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

This will be a great resource down in New Zealand for the Kiwis and for those visiting that beautiful country. It can definitely take off locally if enough people contribute and use the site to log in.

The site doesn't appear to be monetized by any advertising at the moment so it doesn't appear that this site will make much money unless they change the business model.