New Index

[da wong query]

From Research Buzz:

"Earlier this week AltaVista announced a search enhancement to their site. First off, the index is a lot bigger. Before the enhancement the index was around 375 million pages. Now it's 550 million fully-indexed, mostly-HTML documents (there are some text documents.)"

Anyone see any differences lately?

[mayor]

No difference here. Zero AV traffic yesterday, zero AV traffic today. 0/0 = 0% improvement.

[backus]

Yes, they have deleted all doorway pages!!! Big problem!!!

[Napoleon]

No change so far.... for a moment you got me excited! Does the announcement specify a date? Maybe it's coming but just not there yet.

[pete]

Ive seen Alta's number of results per search shifting up and down on every search since the 19th which ive pencilled in as an update

Loads of new pages included and it seems that the database hasnt settled yet. Still filtering out spam pages i think!

Some of our doorways are gone but the majority are still in. Ones that are gone:
1) Poor link pop.
2) One page domains

Must say that our traffic from Alta has taken a dip since they changed their look and feel from "smart is beautiful" --> "the search company". Anyone else noticing this?

[seth_wilde]

They seem to still be working out the details, on the 28th they were showing almost 500,000,000 sites in their DB and now their only showing 316,000,000. I have a feeling you might see some of your missing pages reappear in the near future.

[Boaz]

"our traffic from Alta has taken a dip since they changed their look and feel from "smart is beautiful" --> "the search company". Anyone else noticing this?" - surprisingly enough, after going over several clients' log files for the last month, I've noticed just the opposite...
I'm actually seeing more Altavista traffic than in the previous months - without having had significant improvements in ranking in most cases.

[WebGuerrilla]

AV has definitely lost substantial ground to Google. It seems that the combination of all the pro Google press, lack of regular updates and the new Yahoo look has taken its tole. I'm not sure a bigger database will help much.

The clock is ticking.......