Something is happening!?

But I'm not sure what.....

[makemetop]

Running checks on HotBot and Iwon this morning started getting some very strange results on checking my sites. One moment it would come up with 56 pages on a site then list 2 then 18 then back to 56 - all within a few seconds. When I did manage to get a peek, a load of pages I have never submitted (or seen crawled) started to show up in the new Inktomi format (not using meta description). A little further searching and I also got a glimpse of 2 sites which I have not submitted to Inktomi (but are linked from sites that have been) - all sorts of obscure internal pages as well. Something seems to have a done a really deep spidering but I've not seen Slurp access anything apart from pages I've submitted or revisiting home pages. There has been a lot of activity from spiders coming from ip3000.com and German and French telecom for some reason and a few IPs using Microsoft URL checker to spider everything on my sites pretty hard (and it is still going on). I wonder if Slurp is running round in a different guise?

As it is the first time for ages I've seen something happening to the DB that appears to be pages spontaneously appearing (even if it was for just a few minutes) rather than the opposite I wondered if anyone else is seeing this?

Does not appear to be effecting the Freeserve DB which is static. Unfortunately, the DB didn't stay stable long enough for me to check anything apart from unique words or urls so I was not able to check any ranking improvements (or otherwise).

[rcjordan]

>I wondered if anyone else is seeing this?

Yes, I'm seeing what appear to be new, INK-fed referrals from About and Looksmart. See my post re About [webmasterworld.com], we might be seeing the same thing from different perspectives. Whatever's going on, if INK has latched on to this particular site of mine, I'm going to be one very happy fellow. I last submitted it through anzwers about 2 months ago, btw.

[tedster]

I think we'll see some very interesting Ink behavior over the next few weeks as they work on the details of how their paid operation will work.

They will need to juggle getting clickthrough data from their small database and still give good exposure to their larger, "stickier" database. I can imagine that this will be a touchy area.

I hope they don't opt for fast back and forth switching such as makemetop reports -- that would make it a real challenge in knowing where you stand.