Fireball.de & Espotting

Free submit?

[heini]

Fireball.de as part of the LycosEurope network now has espotting listings on top of serps as well.
Fireball used to be the´fastest indexing engine on the web - spammers paradise...
Lately many german webmasters have complained about bans on whole domains, about rejection of submissions, about selective rejection of submissions in certain topics...

General impression seems to be Fireball is going downhill.

[Rumbas]

Spot on heini.
I just checked rankings on a few domains and some of them were dropped. Seems that "long time" domains stay in there though. Traffic has been dropping steadily for the last year or so.

Oh yeah, and the SERPSs are still very spammy.

[oLeon]

this month there´ll be some changes on Fireball...
wait and see!

could be that the serps are better again due to domaincollapsing that FB´d have included as FB pronounced last autumn.

[heini]

>some changes

I hate to say it but the only chance for Fireball to come back as a real search engine would be to drop their own engine, as well as AV for international searches.

Fireball's tech had originally been developed from a Berlin University project. It was good when it started out, but has not been improvrd much since. It's out of date.

They should take Fast on board. After all Fireball is a part of the Lycos.Europe group.

[oLeon]

>They should take Fast on board

Oh, I disagree absolutely because there are not enough SEs around the world that we can afford to throw a SE away.

I assume FB is near to include all of these things what FAST, Google, AV has done already like linkpop, domaincollapsing.

[heini]

Agreed - alternatives to the big engines are a good thing per se. As long as those are real alternatives.
I've seen statements from CEO Kalb, dating back to last summer I think, concerning introducing linkpop, and the collapsing has been announced too.
We'll see what comes out of it.
Plain linkpop anyhow is not exactly state of the art.

If the Fireball team really is able to come up with a totally overhauled and improved search tech and algo, I'll be the first to congratulate.
Could also be a wise decision from Lycos to try and use the resources inhouse.