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[altavista.com...]
Freshness and size won't happen overnight. With billions of pages to be spidered it will take many months and some heavy server load. But it has to be done.
Brad, AV's competition crawl the entire web at least once a month. If they wish to become a top choice SE again they will have to revisit their sites more often. I see many more Googlebots and FAST crawlers in my log files than I see Scooters.
I submitted only 5 pages of a new site yesturday. It got it about 70 % crawled overnight....Any similar experiences of new sites not included yet?
Macguru, I didn't even submit my new site; I only added a link to it from another site. It is a small site but I was surprised to see that Scooter had covered it already.
But seriously, there are a LOT of improvements, but they are going nowhere. If they want to be serious, they need to hire some TOPNOTCH people, get the best out of them, and determine to be the BEST bar none...they have to come out internally and say, we need to analyze every single dam thing google is doing and do it as well or better and find some innovations and do that better too.
But that is the attitude of the leader, google. AV still doesn't come close... I once emailed the CTO of AV just before google took over the search engine market, and he emailed me back that they were planning a lot of new stuff and it was going to be really great. Seemed like a nice bloke.. really too bad it didn't work out.
At the time, the idea of a portal seemed great, because Yahoo was so successful at it, and AV owned the nondirectory search... it seemed that AV really lost out in not building my.av.com. But again, their portal never touched the quality of my.yahoo.com. (And now there actually is a huge opening for a great my.something.com because yahoo's ads are killing their customer satisfaction.. and the founders of iwon.com are trying to build it, but they are also far from their goal..)
AV's idea of an icon within the results, had it been done a tad differently, could have brought them some income in a smart way and some traffic.
I have a question, if google allowed you guys to pay $1.00/month for a little icon next to your listing, with no effect on the results, and it was real subtle...how many urls would you pay that $1 on? And would it bother you as a searcher if it was there.
AV, with no traffic, is charging $19 per URL! If it were per domain, plus $x for url, ok...but $19 per url? No way...
Ie, /faq/account/1f - which is a 404. /faq/account/ is what it should be hitting.
79 requests were 404's from 157 total requests from Scooter. That's not counting the 301's that the apache spelling module redirected. :(
However, big increase in traffic from Scooter.
However, the directory feature (refine search) is really nice. Allthough refining spam results only result in more spam, so ...
Not sure what relevance these results have to a host:webmasterworld.com search...
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An AVguy could let us know whether this really is the "updated algo" or just a testing one for example
..or maybe we need an AltaEgoGuy...
The serps are not relevant, no possibility for AV to get in competition with G + F
I hope AV still does some clearing-ups, otherwise we can forget the SE at all.
I *know* where *I* want to go, today. And I don't need a computer to tell me where to go...
The serps are not relevant, no possibility for AV to get in competition with G + F
I completely agree with oLeon. Search results are completely irrelevant so in my opinion AV is as good as useless as a search engine. :(
This is in contrast to the latest All The Web update (a place where I used to get very good results). My pages there have all but disappeared unless you use the 'exact phrase' checkbox.
So I say, welcome back AV! bye bye All The Web (self-interest beats rational assessment any day)
They'd better nail that loophole - you can drive a whole lot of SPAM through it by turning a single #2 listing into 5 top 10 listings through meta refresh pages.
To be honest though, after two years of virtual sabbatical (when nobody cared anymore what he was doing) Scooter needs to make some new friends. I see his tyre marks all over one four-year-old site but a site that paid for six months spidering at the start of the year has only two pages in the index. A number of 2-month-old sites which were not submitted to AV or Google but are well linked have never even heard from Scooter; Googlebot was calling round and eating everything in the house within two weeks.
But then the About Basic Submit link gives a 404.
What's the little grey thing down in the corner? A server?
Like I said I have been doing well all along with AV and only see this as an improvement. Checking the logs from one of my sites yesterday, here is my top 4 shown here for illustration:
Yahoo 368 26.04%
MSN 279 19.78%
Google 185 13.13%
Altavista 138 9.81%
****
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This has been fairly consistant and I'm happy with them sending my around %10 of my SE referals and for me, at least on this site, Google doesn't fend that much better. When doing comparison searches I am finding the algo to be holding up pretty well against the competition. However, it is still too early to get the whole story. We'll see how it looks a month from now :)
<<I'm shocked to find my pages are all doing well in the new Alta Vista - almost as well as Google. My pages have been designed only with Google in mind - phrase in titles/H1/H2 and lots of links with good link text - but have not had good keyword density.>>
Same here. A lot of my sites rank very well in AV all of a sudden. But they are buried under the sponsored listings.
They really need to shove those sponsored listings off to the side or whatever. I doubt very much Average Joe is gonna spend much effort to try to locate the real results in this mess. They have miles to go before they will be competitive again.
This new update puts all my sites right where I want them.
Three big cheers from this end of Cyberland!
Keep it up Altavista
zeus
P.s the new pages and update has not come to England yet.
This new update puts all my sites right where I want them
It looks like they are using more or less the same old algo that they used a couple of years ago.
Some of our older sites are now right back where they were a long time ago. They have been "gone" for a long time until the last few days...
The SERPS look better than Google's and are definately more consistent. On Altavista I see "cityname widgets" & "cityname statename widgets" producing very similar results, while on Google a totally different set are produced for the two terms. Makes sence the results should be pretty similar to me.
I love the refresh feature AV have added. Odd thing is how my sites seem to be getting "freshed" daily even though I don't pay for the AV PFI / freshing program.;)
Keep up the good work AV.....I would love to see the power shared out more evenly, hopefully this new look will help to get them some of their users back.
With 85% of my SE traffic coming from Google & Partners I would definitely like to see my eggs spread out into a few more baskets. The thought of something nasty happening to the Google Algo makes me very nervous.
>I also noticed that AltaVista's serps have greatly
>improved and seem more accurate than Google's since they
>changed their algo in September.
Yes, we did, not only it does seems to be more accurate than Google, it feels more Google-like than the real Google, I would say. We already mentioned it here, actually.
Hi percentages,
>The Altavista revamp looks good to me, very much a Google
>feel to it.
True enough. Google may be dying of success, but the Google spirit seems to live on... in other Search Engines!
[edited by: heini at 12:36 pm (utc) on Nov. 15, 2002]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]
I think that if someone clicks through you your page from a av serp then it gets added to the "fresh" queue for the next 48 hours
Im in the same situation I get 89% from Google and friends and makes me very nervous, because I have tried ones where my page got a PR0 and that was not happy times.
zeus
