Restless and eager to build businesses at a young age on a continent where opportunities are limited and unemployment is rife, Ghana’s Opare has built a search engine to compete with Google and YouTube called Mudclo.
According to Opare, his new search engine, Mudclo, will challenge the dominance of YouTube. Opare, a level 300 sociology student at the University of Ghana, taught himself how to code by taking online courses during his free time and crafted his tech knowledge to create his own search engine.
Mudclo is a free search engine for videos. Mudclo discovers and streams videos from different locations on the internet all in one place. Opare believes that his search engine is good enough to compete with the best engines out there in the market which include the likes of Yahoo, and Google.
Ghana’s Opare designs a search engine to compete with Google
“I believe that my business is good enough and that it can scale globally. It is a legitimate point to say that YouTube is a video hosting website, but they are two different entities. While YouTube is a video hosting website, Mudclo combines the power of YouTube and two other video hosting websites in order to create Mudclo,” he said.
Mudclo’s users’ most popular searches include adverts, music videos, and amateur content. It has already caught the attention of some of the world’s big tech companies, including more established video hosting sites although there is some work to be done on Mudclo to fix bugs, and boost the features and visual experiences it offers users.
“With all entrepreneurs, they feel that there is a rewarding or gratifying feeling that comes with creating a product or a service that will actually matter to the world,” the teenager added.
Experts say information and communication technology could help Africa overcome infrastructure inadequacies, satisfy rising consumer demand, boost regional trade, and diversify economies, ending reliance on raw materials.
However, some critics have come out to say that Mudclo is just a search website and not a search engine as claim it to be. Claude Ayitey argues that Mudclo is basically an amalgamation of an Application Programming Interface (API) into one website.
“So what Mudclo basically does is presents search results from all the video search engines, and then puts all of them in one place. For example, if you want a OnePlus 5 video, it will bring all the videos together, from different providers, and present them to you. Mtchew, this is even some publicity for him,” Ayitey wrote in a post on Gharage.com.
“Just as absurd as it is for someone to say they can prepare a meal just because they have been to several 5-star restaurants, that’s the same absurdity and erroneous information this website presents.
“I find it insulting that amidst all the several fraudulent exposes of software hypocrisies, someone who just comes up with a website because he knows APIs can come to say they are building an app that will rival YouTube. Yea, it’s good to build stuff but don’t go out there claiming to be what you’re not. That is a fraud!”.
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