does anyone have more info

petersnews - who are they?

[jennifer]

I have been getting a lot of activity (20-30 users simultaneously) on one of my clients sites from www.petersnews.com. It appears to be from a site that is planning to be a search engine Can anyone tell me more about them or explain why our site is getting so much activity from them?

[Mike_Mackin]

Welcome jennifer

Seems to be the same as DavesEngine.com

You might wish to Email Dave

[msgraph]

Ahh the dreaded DavesEngine. They have been planning on creating a search engine for some time now, though I haven't seen any more progress.(not that there ever was any).

Edited by: msgraph

[jennifer]

Thanks for the extremely quick response.

I'll send an e-mail to davesengine and let you know what type of response...if any, that I receive.

[rencke]

While you are at it Jennifer, you might want to ask him how a page that has no links going anywhere can generate any traffic at all. If you get an answer, be sure to post it under "Breaking Search Engines News" as I am sure that the entire community here at WmW would like to know how that incredible feat can be accomplished. Could you also post a line from your client's log showing the referral? That would be extremely interesting.

[han solo]

Actually, I've been spidered by a number of "bots" coming from petersnews and davesengine...but i have yet to see why they spidered me at all.

I decided to give them some very, very spammy looking pages, just in case they are up to what i would be doing, were the situation reversed...

Seriously, though, they are the biggest no show...why spider and say you're putting together an engine, if you aren't actually going to do it?

Cheers,
Han solo

[Machiavelli]

A previous mention [webmasterworld.com]. I think that each of these is merely a nom de plume for some other engine.

[jennifer]

rencke

below is the referral line from the log file for petersnews:

news12.petersnews.com - - [04/Jan/2001:15:22:43 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 216 "-" "user-1.petersnews.com"

All the other referral lines from petersnews are similar.

They followed the links through the whole site....including trying to check some password protected folders. Rather interesting for a search engine that isn't.