Infotiger

Shouldn't this be in the "Majors" list?

[sidyadav]

[infotiger.com...]

The results are superb, but haven't seen their cralwer (whatever it is) visiting my site and wow, my site is listed.
I don't know why, those don't look their original results to me, but I checked, and they are not AV, INK, Teoma/AskJeeves or Google results.

Anybody know more about this one?

Sid

[mcavic]

It looks to me like the results are coming from Googlebot. My page has a date/time stamp at the bottom, and Googlebot was the only one visiting my site at that minute. Maybe it's a metasearch?

You're right, though - the ranking is unlike any other engine.

[sidyadav]

But if its a META search, where does it get all the dates?
And my date from Google is totally different here. And even the size is in bytes, where in every search engine, its in KBs.

Sid

[mcavic]

Yeah, good points. I don't even know what the dates mean. It's not the spidered date, and not the last-modified-date, as far as I can tell.

[sidyadav]

Just noticed something wierd:

1. AlltheWeb.com
However, this browser may not support basic Web standards, preventing thedisplay of our site's d esign details and many graphical elements. ... Description: Search with a simple interface and huge database. Also offers news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP search....Category: Computers > Internet > Searching > Search Engines
date: 27-Nov-2003 - size: 5120 bytes
[http://www.alltheweb.com/]

The highlited sentence and the sentence in Italics is the exact DMOZ description and category.
I got it from [infotiger.com...] and that is the same exact result # in Google,.

Conspiracy theory: It spiders parts from the Google SERPs, analyzes it, and puts it into its own index which explains the DMOZ info. And if you go to "Add URL" it will try to find the page in Google and spider parts of the text snippets. And which also explains the mysterious "dates". It also maybe that it converts the Google page-size into bytes to differentiate it some more from Google.

This engine is totally a mystery.

Sid

[nakulgoyal]

It seems what Sid says makes sense.

[mcavic]

Okay... The excerpts are screen-scraped from Google (and poorly). No doubt about it.

The number of bytes is rounded off to the nearest K. So it's not more exact than Google. And the dates could be made up.

It searches well, though, and seems to search over the full page text, not just certain snippets. It refuses to search for numbers-only... odd.

I'd guess that it's scraping Google in realtime... Actually, now that I look more closely, the ranking looks like Google's post-Florida, but shuffled.

[mcavic]

Ahhh - proof: Do a search for http [infotiger.com]. The results on page 1 are all very high PR sites.

[sidyadav]

it maybe, it downloads the summary excerpts out of Google's "Cached" pages, measures the "Cached" page and gives the size in bytes, gets the date off when the "Cached" page was spidered, and also, gets the URL off here:

This is G o o g l e's cache of [widgets.org...]

But then, I have 2 theories, in theory one (msg.5) all the facts match up except for it searching the full textutal content of the pages, and in this one, the DMOZ info is a mystery.
I'll try their "Feedback" and ask these questions.

Sid

[jeremy goodrich]

Any engine that has zip, zero, zilch on their "about us" on their technology, the background of their programmers, or how their robot behaves (and this from an engine that invites submission) seems awefully odd to me.

99.9% sure they don't have their own search database at all, else, they'd mention something about it.

[Fischerlaender]

99.9% sure they don't have their own search database at all, else, they'd mention something about it.

Yepp. I know a page where the UserAgent of the visiting client is shown in the title tag. You just have to search for this page with an obscure engine and you'll see which robot has visited this page. With Infotiger this test showed Googlebot.

[sidyadav]

Nice scenario...
This proves it!

Sid

[edited by: jeremy_goodrich at 6:49 pm (utc) on Dec. 29, 2003]