librarian - 2:58 pm on Aug 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hi,
My client's site also experienced a sudden drop in log file size in mid July. The drop had me looking for possible causes. I eliminate the normal weekend drop. I thought it was the Democratic Convention. But the file sizes never recovered after the convention. Finally, I noticed the threat on the image database update. When looking at our listings in the database I noticed two things. First, the image database now appears to be using a new algo similar to the one used in Google's main index. Second, I discovered all the client's graphics/images are gone from the index. The site remains in the main index.

The site did suffer from problems earlier this year when the server it was hosted on was hacked. This lead to a number of problems for a while. So I wondered if we happened to just miss being spidered. In checking back, Google's Image bot visited in April and then never again. It had also spidered the previous couple of months to April. I have seen other spidering breaks in the past when we remained in the index. So I'm really puzzled why we disappeared this time. Hopefully a glitch that will fix itself in the next spidering / update cycle.

In a search on the image database My first impression was how similar the results were to those in the main index. Not what I had come to expect in a search for an image. The pages listed were filled with text. A LOT of text. Would love to see how the variables are weighted in the algo.

Librarian