MSN: Theme-based Inktomi algorithm

Does the theme system yield clusters of same-site results?

[Winooski]

Have you ever noticed clusters of same-site or mirror-site results in the Inktomi/"Web Pages" section of MSN Search results?

For example, try searching for "car racks" (without the quotes). When I clicked through a few pages of results, I noticed that #70 and 71 were the same site (car-racks.com), and #72-75 were also from one site (altrec.com). This isn't the only instance of this phenomenon: I find that a great many searches I try on MSN Search yield page clusters at some point when you get to the "Web Pages" section.

What's going on? Could this be due to MSN Search's theme-using algorithm? Regardless, I thought that SEs took great pains to avoid such kinds of results, as it provides the end-user with fewer results choices.

Any ideas?

[jeremy goodrich]

Hi, you might check out some of the comments made in this thread by WebGuerrilla:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Seems that MSN has clustering of results enabled by default, so that way you do get multiple pages from the same domain appearing next to each other.

I think it looks kind of spammy myself, but fortunately, you can change the options in the advanced search here:
[search.msn.com...]

[Winooski]

Hi Jeremy. Thanks very much! What a user unfriendly default, huh? Leave it to Microsoft...

[Brett_Tabke]

That unclustering sure explains alot doesn't it? The question is why there isn't more "spammy" appearing sites with duplicates and doorways hanging around.

[littleman]

As of this AM I got 20k requests from Ink so far today. I am sure it will be closer to 36-40k by the end of the day. It is completely ridicules! The bot to human referrer ratio is much like Ink's P/E ratio.