Alta vista Australia (regional AV)

Own Databases?

[Stricko]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone knows if AV uses its own databases in each region. I'm particulary interested in AV Australia. I have contacted them and they responded by saying www.altavista.com.au has a different database than www.altavista.com and only accept the domain (no tunnel pages). I have been submitting clients URL's for quite some time now with no evidence of indxing but tunnel pages I submitted to infoseek about 10 months ago are now appearing in AV Australia.

Did AV Australia just lie to me and I should be submitting to go network? Or should I just wait another 6 months to be eventually listed? Any ideas?

[rencke]

Just did a quickie test and AV Australia seems to work the same way as all other national variants. I.e. the user controls the choice between the local domain search or the worldwide search. Local domain searches will take place in the local db, which is 100% complete - at least that is what they seem to try to achieve. Worldwide searches take place in the main index, which contains only a few pages from each international site.

One area where AV Australia differs is that in other national AV:s they will give you all sites in the local language, regardless of domain, even if you made no language choice. But altavista.au only shows the local domain - presumably because the local language is English and they can't separate Australian dot-coms from the rest.

The really interesting question is: Do the Australians accept AV:s default choice for a local search or do they click the other radio button for a worldwide search?