History
Alleba Filipino Search Engine was the result of a dream of building a web directory and search engine for Filipino-created/related websites. Alleba’s humble beginnings go all the way back in July of year 2001, in an apartment on 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) in Manhattan, New York. Brandishing a brand-new Dell Inspiron laptop (it was considered at the peak of technology back then), I built a barebones web directory and baptized it using my mother’s maiden name (Abella), only backwards (Alleba). It’s pronounced (a-‘yeh-bah) or (al-‘yeh-bah).
Alleba gives Filipino-made sites a good chance of being seen and viewed by practically everyone in the world, via our popular Filipino Directory. Moreover, virtually unknown sites get better odds of being crawled by larger search engines (Google, MSN) just by listing with us.
Family
Abella is my middle name. It’s a custom in the Philippines wherein the children always take on their mothers’ previous surnames as their middle names. My mom Baby has four sisters and two brothers, Brooks, Bojo, Jing-jing, Teri, Malu and Ivy. All in all they produced all twenty-five of us nutcases.
Here are our names, ordered by age: Angel, Tina, Ritchie, Reggie, David, Dennis, Chinky, Marty, Andrew (that’s me!), Fanny, May, Joanna, Cecil, Ina, Jonathan, Jofer, Ria, Tinky, Luan, Dodong, Patis, Chrissie, Riro and Marc. We’re based in several locations around the globe: Davao City, Manila, Toronto, Canada and Chicago, USA.
Me
If you don’t already know, my name is Andrew dela Serna. I run Alleba.com on my own, with some help from a few of my cousins. My cousin Ria runs Alleba’s political weblog, Alleba Politics. I was educated at Ateneo de Manila U., and at Pratt Institute in NY. I’m part of a cool multimedia company called EACOMM in Eastwood City. If you’re in need of a website, or a CD-ROM yearbook, come to us! We’ll blow your socks off with the quality of our digital products.
I serve as an editor for the Open Directory Project and the World Wide Web Virtual Library.
For questions or inquiries, you can reach me at andrew [@] alleba.com. You can also post your queries at our message boards.