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.
Today, search.ch is the second most popular search engine and most popular phonebook in Switzerland.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.
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.