One huge AV database

I give up on these people

[cynthia]

I just did an altavista search after this update for the terms that we had been doing reasonably well on (really well before June 13). For the first search, of the first 20, 8 are .uk and 2 more are .au. That's half. This is a topic that where sites lose relevancy when you cross borders. These sites were never there before.
Also, there were over 25 million results. This search term was one had I focused on because there wasn't a lot of competition, if I remember correctly, a few thousand, less than five thousand, and it brought people. Are they merging all the English speaking databases? That might work for some stuff, but they will lose relevancy for topics that don't travel well. Does anyone know what they are doing?

[mr_dredd2]

the alternate subbing page at altavista uk has gone, just directing u to av.com ransom note page...

on av.com I had a no.3 ranking on a competitive term, and now its gone down 7 or 8 places since yesterday or the day before...

[heini]

Not sure if this is related:
since a few days the submit on AV.de gets redirected to the AV.com submit page.
Are they merging all dbs?
See my posts here [webmasterworld.com]

(edited by: heini at 5:41 pm (gmt) on June 25, 2001

[msgraph]

I remember two weeks ago I performed a few English-only searches, half the sites listed were in Japanese, Spanish, and German. It doesn't seem to happen now on the same searches but it was a bit odd at the time.

[cynthia]

heini,
I just did check the other thread. Looks like merging databases. Just the number of results for the same searches as a few weeks ago point that direction. All those results didn't come out of nowhere. From a couple of thousand to 25.5 million for the same search in three weeks. Since not all of my terms had the same thing happen (although the NUMBER of search results ballooned on all), perhaps they identified the most used queries and limited those to .com, etc. This was a less used term that still brought me a lot of traffic because I basically owned it until...

[heini]

From a couple of thousand to 25.5 million for the same search in three weeks

Well, this canīt surely be a direct result of merging dbs.
All non .coms combined do not make up for such a leap. Something else must be going on; some shifting in the algo, perhaps. AV.de has been working with an old version of their technology, so Iīm not up to the latest developments. Maybe some AV specialists might come in to help?

[cynthia]

"From a couple of thousand to 25.5 million for the same search in three weeks"
That was from this morning or last night or whatever. I just checked again, same search, and received this:
"We found 34,109,856 results:".
Growing fast. Still same top ten, though.

[cynthia]

You know, I'm not sure this means what it used to mean from av. They show the "we have found....results". But only 20 pages show up. You go to the 20th page and that's all there is. 20 pages X 10 results per page is 200 results. Period. The results statement is meaningless.

[cynthia]

Although I can't say I've ever gone to the last page before. Never was much point in that.

[seth_wilde]

It seems as though they've have joined all they're databases together to create one "Global Database" for their pay-for-inclusion program

"Express Inclusion allows you to rapidly insert and frequently update your pages in the global database that powers AltaVista's search results. AltaVista and its partners answer more than 50 million search queries a day, reaching more than 63 million users worldwide."

[webmasterworld.com...]

[heini]

Okay, Cynthia, we can stop scratching our heads. Itīs nice to get the confirmation that something was going there. Would have been nicer if it werenīt such bad news.

[cynthia]

I'm with you there Heini, but I already got the bad news with my lower rankings. Goodbye AltaVista. You're the SE I learned on.
But I bet they change again. One thing I've learned is that this isn't static.

[heini]

Well AV has never been my SE, Iīm going for Google and for Fast, who are trying something slightly similar to AV right now.
Iīm not sure if AV will change back from this development. And I think itīs a pretty dangerous course they are steering. The relevancy of AV serps has long been going down. How can they persuade siteowners to pay for inclusion, if this doesnīt generate traffic, if it might mean, you have paid for beeing buried on page 19 or something?
For the time being I will not recommend paying them.

[cynthia]

yeah, pay for being buried, then you have to renew in 6 mos. Their results pages are just junk now. I don't use av personally when I want to search. I've been working on google rankings, although I'm going to keep an eye on av, I don't have much hope.

[oLeon]

I remember that in taraīs researchbuzz was an atricle about the listing on AV.com (I donīt find it). It talked about the automatical "AND" withih the results up to three phrases. First after that the operator is "OR", and you get a lot of listings.
It seems that AV hasnīt this function any more.

heini, I agree - I cannot see a reason to throw money away untill I havenīt a kind of guaranty that the listing is pursuable again.
I got result where I searched for two words but got results where only one word was on the page. No relevancy at all, so - why AV.com?