Scrub The Web - Traffic?

Not great amounts but enough to pique my interest

[IanTurner]

I have started to see some small amounts of traffic from Scrub the web on some uncompetitive search phrases. (And you guessed it I haven't done any optimisation for this engine - after all conventional wisdom has been that it is not a big name and no market share to speak of)

Has anyone else seen any traffic from Scrub the Web and if so how competitive are the keywords?

[jeremy goodrich]

0 to date. On any site :( they've been around for a while, though, so that could change...

[Brad]

Sorry, I can't remember ever getting a hit from them.

[IanTurner]

I think they will have to tidy up the design if they want to make it. Its functional but thats about all you can say for it.

Brad - that was my experience before this month but I have seen referrals on a couple sites just recently.

[Brad]

Ian,

Directly from the site or have they partnered up with a metaengine?

Some of these smaller engines are starting to syndicate.

[IanTurner]

I am seeing the scrubtheweb domain in my referral logs, but my thought was that it may be a partnership of some kind. Possibly with a UK based meta.

[heini]

Saw an occasional hit too, Ian. My probably totally unjustified thought was log advertizing though ;)

[kfander]

Scrub the Web has been around for quite awhile, although they were never a major player.

[karen998877]

I've been getting alot of traffic from STW in the last month. I notice they have completely redone their site. The results are fresh and a lot like Google's.

I don't know about the other comments, but scrubtheweb.com has a great search engine. Their search results are very similar to Google and extremely relevant to the query being performed. Their database is up-to-date, fast and most importantly, the results are not bias in the fact that they have to be "popular" in order to rank decent in the results.

In the past month I have submitted 5 top level domains to STW and all are now appearing in their results. The key to submitting is to submit a top level domain:

widgets-r-us*.com

And then you MUST confirm the submission via email or you won't have a chance in hell.

STW has been on the Net since 1996 so not only do they have a large following, but they also have staying power. I've seen search engines come and go, but STW is one that seems to be here to stay and because results are "new site" friendly, I think you'll find more of the new stuff rather than the popular stuff you can find on Google.

In addition to having a great search engine, STW also has great Webmaster tools. They have a meta tag builder, meta tag analyzer and a submission program. All of these useful tools are free!

If you haven't been to STW lately I encourage you to visit and see if your experience is as good as mine.

Thanks,
Karen

[edited by: jeremy_goodrich at 9:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2002]
[edit reason] changed the example url to be delinked [/edit]

[heini]

Hi Karen. Yeah I thought they were trying to sell something, when all of a sudden I had regular referrers in my logs.

[rcjordan]

Since the free submit is very limited (one per day per email address) and hinges upon a confirmation, I have concerns that this is some sort of harvesting operation. There privacy policy doesn't clearly define what they will do with the info:
[scrubtheweb.com...]

[Mike_Mackin]

>I have concerns that this is some sort of harvesting operation.

My thoughts as well.
Since my results show in the top 3 anyway ;) I elected to pass.
I'm thinking that someone in this thread MAY know what is done with that info.

[karen998877]

When I submitted to STW I used a dedicated email JUST for them. I always do this when I submit to a new engine so I can catch the spammer! In the past month the ONLY email I received was their one and only confirmation email for each top level domain I submitted. I simply confirmed and within about a week or so these appeared in their results. Now I'm getting pretty good traffic from them too.

I think the reason they limit to one submission is because there are so many of these automated submission softwares that spam these search engines. By limiting to just one per email it would certainly stop that. Also because they confirm via email it prevents users from using someone elses email to make fake submissions which would result in looking like stw was spamming the email box.

When you read their help pages they also tell you that they do not use your email address for any other purpose other than their confirmation email.

[scrubtheweb.com...]

Bye for now,
Karen

[Brad]

I was just looking at the SERPs. They are looking much improved over what I saw a year ago.

[Dante_Maure]

Hrmmmm.

Lessee...

Googled karen998877 and found a certain [e-mail] posting some very intelligent techstuff on an aspseek support mailing list.

Now, aspseek is search engine software yes?

New profile, first post, bubbly enthusiasm for... well how 'bout that? A search engine!

Coincidence? Could be. ;)

</sarcastic jaded defamatory suggestion>

[karen998877]

Yes that's ME alright. I have many email addresses and a high interest in search engines and their technologies.

If you don't research search engine technologies then how are you going to write anything intelligent about them? I use aspseek on my own intranet and find it to be a good solution for a non clustered small search engine environment, but for mainstream? I think not as it is memory hungry and has millions of bugs. That's why you don't see much of that software powering much of anything.

At first I thought STW was using something like aspseek (with bugs fixed), but when you look more closely at the search results, the query string elements and the fact that the META keywords is not even considered when ranking results (as it is with aspseek), you have to guess that it's obviously not or one hell of a good fix. Plus STW doesn't let you search by date added, sort results, wildcard searching (ie, *) and things like aspseek tries to do. And even if they are using this, what has that got to do with anything on this topic?

Regards,
Karen