Excite doing really wierd searches...

I have no idea what this means

[TallTroll]

There I was, trying to do a site:www.clients-domain search on Excite to find some particular info on their site, when I discovered a VERY bizarre effect

If you construct a query so that the term you are searching is concatenated to the site:www.foo.com bit (ie foosite:www.falseurl.co.uk [search.excite.com]), you get a list of sites purporting to be results from within the site. This is odd, becuase in the above example, it isn't a real domain. Put the space in and it suddenly recognises the false domain name

It doesn't seem to matter what the term or the site you put in is, as long as you run them together, you get a wierd list of sites. The sites in the example all seem to be related to "st" in some way, some being Saint Someones whatsit, some having st in the domain name somewhere

If you put in different search terms, you get different lists, all seemingly unrelated to each other,

Some more examples:

1 [search.excite.com]
2 [search.excite.com]
3 [search.excite.com]

Has anyone got the faintest idea what goes on here?

[TallTroll]

Helloooooo

Anyone got any ideas? Or have I not made it clear enough what the wierdness is, and just confused people?

[caine]

TT welcome to the world of Excite,

I noticed a while back some really dodgy SERP's completley non related to the search term, though i have'nt tried the url listing effect that you've noted, i would'nt be surprised in the slightest.

will have a play and get back to you.

[caine]

that was quick,

just tried domain, not in web or directory for url.

put in a very unique kphrase in the directory, up pops listing, with a description that lists three words, great. However when i reverted back to serps off web, the biggest load of bollox come up.

Their is no justice, with excite, though i did notice that they had crawled yesterday, very little crawl.

[backus]

Could it be said the Excite will be doing plenty of weird things in the weeks to come? I mean, it will want to try and sell itself somehow, otherwise it goes down the pan, so what better way would be than to test its own capabilities.

[jeremy goodrich]

Hmm. Interesting stuff, but IMHO, their technology has been lagging for a good year and a half, at least. Ever since I noticed how easy it was to get to the top (as long as they actually spider you and your links) I've thought they'd gone nuts.

Perhaps this is their way of showing that you don't need technology to be a search engine? Just brand? After all, why else would anyone search there with cr@p like that filling the results pages?