Become.com - A human touch and John Glick

New search engine ranks using human feedback

[Jon_King]

[dailyrundown.com...]

[become.com...]

[Matt Probert]

Become.com is a shopping search engine, according to them. Perhaps I am alone in considering this type of search as distinct from a general search engine where one might seek to research general information?

Matt

[garyr_h]

I noticed this engine a few weeks ago in my logs. Looks pretty good actually...

[mcavill]

It seems to get stuck on one of my sites, requesting huge numbers of pages - so I've banned it via robots.txt.

Hopefully it'll respect that.

Anyone else see this bot requesting a lot of pages several times?

[crobb305]

Do they follow links for page/url discovery? Or, can you submit urls somehow. Aside from a feedback form, I don't really see a submit option.

[martinibuster]

Become.com is a product of exava.com [exava.com], looks like they changed their name from exava to become.com (Note to their webmaster: spelled lowercase in the gif logo, uppercase Exava in home page title tag and web page copy elsewhere. Also might want to fix the title tags for the become.com contact page so it says become.com and not Exava).

The founders of Become.com founded MySimon, the shopping directory. Interestingly, one of the cofounders is the man who was behind Wisenut.

Their VP of Product Management [become.com] served in a similar role for AltaVista.

Anybody sign up as a beta tester? (this is still in beta)

[Eathan]

Interestingly, one of the cofounders is the man who was behind Wisenut.

Hmm... I think I see the similarity. Both bots crawl like crazy, yet I see nothing in the way of traffic.

I've been curious about BecomeBot for a few weeks now. It's in the logs of most of my sites on a daily basis, crawling and recrawling the same pages over and over again. I've considered blocking them, but haven't been annoyed enough quite yet.

I did see something odd today though. The bot came through on one of my sites with a referring URL of a forum thread (elsewhere) I had posted on. Oddly, the thread didn't include a link to that site, so I'm curious how the bot made the request to get routed to a different domain...

[MarkHutch]

I think I like this company. In the about us section, only the CEO had on a tie. I like that! :)

[Wlauzon]

We got our first actual sale from Become yesterday, so someone is using it.