Fiver_321 - 6:13 am on May 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

Ok, sounds like another piece of the jigsaw this which I havent yet got into.

Heres a precise scenario.

I have a PFI root page in the index. (www.my-pfi-site.com)
It ranks very poorly in Inktomi - 459!, it used to be at number 1 and was there about a month. This was 6 months ago.

www.my-pfi-site.com is at number 2 in Google, and it has been since August 2002

www.my-pfi-site.com is at number 9 in Altavista - don't know how long.

Its presence in Google and Altavista - and the way it ranks well is indicative to me that neither of those two indexes view the site as spam - indeed it is true to say that this is not a spammy site in any way shape or form, no "tricks" - just a straight HTML site with a few sub pages which link back to the main page.

It has around 20 inbound links from other sites.

I went over to www.bestoftheweb.com and did a search for its keywords, the same words for which it ranks well on Google and Altavista.

I noted there that BOW returns 15 results, and that there is no "next results" link or anything so I could not check further, the 15 results returned by BOW are the same as the first 15 returned by MSN.

Still at BOW, I search for www.my-pfi-site.com, and it came up - so it appears to be in there.

My conclusion at the moment is that BOW is Inktomi, based on the identical first 15 results.

However - from reading the other posts here and the ones on the link from tigger, I really got the impression that Inktomi is using other databases in a similar manner to that used by Google. EG if you are in DMOZ, then Google gives you a boost - so I was thinking along the lines of, if you are in BOW, Ink gives you a boost. But BOW and Ink appear to be the same.

Can anyone put me straight - I am floundering around in the dark with the relationships between INK, BOW and the Inktomi Web Map described - again in the link from Tigger.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Fiver