Rumor - Ggl purchases 'lexa crawl...?

Is this true, and what are the ramifications?

[perkiset]

Just heard from a reasonably reliable source that G has purchased/is purchasing the 'lexa crawl - my concern is cloaking G but not A and what the disparity might mean (in terms of exposure to G) - has anyone else heard this? Is this old news?

[volatilegx]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, perkiset :)

I hadn't heard the news... I guess it's new. The implications to cloakers might be negative. It depends on how Google uses the data.

[mhhfive]

what's lexa crawl..?

[volatilegx]

The Alexa spider's database.

[perkiset]

Thank you volatilegx, been watching for a long time, only just decided to jump in. Having decided to surface a bit, I believe I may have some interesting insights at times for this group.

Re " 'lexa" I meant Alexa, just have a nasty habit of not wanting to drop crawler trails / bread crumbs in groups. It isn't exactly like the "Cone of Silence" in here ;-)

I'm wondering if G would actually take the time to analyze differences between the A cache and their own - I provide completely different URLs to surfers than I do to engines, so they would not be able to do an "Apples for Apples" comparison, but it still rather creeps me out. My gut is that they would be using A data for traffic patterns rather than to ferret out cloakers, but from my perspective, "Only the paranoid survive..."

[fischermx]

Frankly I hope they don't. I like both like they are, separated. I use Alexa data a lot through their API.

There's a thread here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Where a guy firmly stated that, but it is the kind of thing would hit the news. So I don't think that happened.

[mhhfive]

I'm still confused... I thought Alexa was 'powered by Google' in the first place... So why would Google need to buy Alexa's database from Amazon?

[MrSpeed]

My guess is that google addresses cloaking when a competitor reports you and it is not handled by an algo at this time, and probably won't be in the future.

Google has many more issues to worry about than catching cloakers. It would take an awful lot of processing power to compare google cache to Alexa. And there could be many false positives for many reasons. Also the percentage of sites that cloak appears to be miniscule.

If someone cloaks to rank for "blue widgets" and that's what the user finds then that's great. It's sucks when a surfer searches for "blue widgets" and a site for online gambling appears.

[edited by: MrSpeed at 1:22 pm (utc) on June 30, 2005]

[volatilegx]

Alexa search is "powered by Google", but the Alexa spider provides the data for an enormous database of "web archive material", a.k.a. the Wayback Machine [archive.org].