AV caught manipulating results on behalf of CMGI

promoting other cmgi stuff without shame...

[han solo]

Look here.

[altavista.com...]

What I got, was results 2,3,4, and 9 all sites powered by MyWay.com, which is part of CMGI, which also owns altavista.com.

I really like their engine, but if they keep up promoting other cmgi stuff, instead of displaying real web content, I am going to be seriously frustrated with them....

Cheers,
Han Solo

[Brett_Tabke]

They have been doing it for months. No different than what Yahoo does with all it's cross promotion and down within site promotion. Go, Hotbot, Lycos, excite - they all do it (lycos being the current worst). Altavista is relatively late getting on the bandwagon.

Oh, not to mention MSN...

[han solo]

First time I've seen it...must remember to learn to write spiders myself...me thinks that the gods of seo probably work much more efficiently this way.

And I've never seen this level of listings in the top results, and for such a generic, unrelated term...

Cheers,
Han solo

[seth_wilde]

Lycos has gotten a little better, when you did a search for "lowering cholesterol" 6 months ago you got 50 pages of webmd results (their partner).....at least now their actually mixing in other sites :)

[Marcia]

han solo, you are not having a good day today. It looks like AV is still having problems since last month's disaster.

Example: brand new little site (not optimized), index page just showed up by URL. Test for links - know how many show up? 52,344,480. First one is a site with tractors (mind you, this is for cinnamon scented little ornaments). Minor, teensy site with these problems, what else is wrong -aside from what you might have observed.?

An insignificant, neglected little section of a site, been in there for months,, never touch it. Generally around 147,000 sites returned, how many today? 11,914,160.

I'm bringing up trivia to make a point and ask this - does this constitute "normal" results? Is it possible that they don't know there's a problem?

There were just some noticable changes, I think it's time to put on more coffee and wait it out for a couple of days. I'm personally grateful that I don't work in their customer support department :)

[han solo]

I know I'm not having a good day, but thanks for noticing. By now, I'm usually at home, playing my role as "regular person," and trying not to think about how the latest trends in algorithmic design might affect my work in the morning...

Altavista cleared up the results, I believe they were porting some of the listings.altavista.com results over to the main page. Or something. I never do know, I just wish I actually knew...

Cheers,
Han Solo

[Brett_Tabke]

Marcia, that could be explained by a simple algo change resulting in more hits on that kw. Stemming, not stemming, site clustering, url counts, meta counts, or alt tag counts, could all effect the number of results returned.