Top Ten on MSN = AskJeeves?

Is this new?

[Axacta]

Maybe I'm behind the times, but I don't remember this before.

[littleman]

I'm not seeing it, could you post an example?

[Axacta]

It seems to be coming and going. Try "bible questions". I also noticed it half way down the page once.

[korkus2000]

It seems to be different here.

[Axacta]

It's definitely not stable. Second last time I tried "bible questions" I got nothing. Last time I got the link, but there was no top ten list.

Then I tried "cars". The top ten link came up half way down the page, and the AskJeeves page had the list of links.

[littleman]

You are talking about the
*Get the Top 10 Most Popular Sites for "bible questions" *
link at the top, right?

Yeah that was directhit, but now it's askjeeves branded. It isn't a big traffic generator, most surfers just regard that link as noise.

[korkus2000]

Are you talking about the "Top 10 Sites For whatever" link at the top that goes to ask jeeves?

I have seen that for a couple weeks. I thought you ment the serps.

[Axacta]

>Are you talking about the "Top 10 Sites For whatever" link at the top that goes to ask jeeves?<

Sorry. I should have been more exact. Yes I meant the "Top 10 Most Popular Sites for..."

[korkus2000]

My fault now that I read it again you were clear. I was checking back and forth then noticed it and felt dumb.

[angiolo]

Yes, it was direct.hit.
the same ten results on Hotbot.

Now it is Askjeevs that is Teoma!

Teoma semms to be strange in this moment: it gives the first page results only (the second, third etc. pages are the same as the first one).

[mbauser2]

I admit that I don't follow Jeeves or DirectHit too closely, but those "Ask Jeeves" results look (to me) like the same old DirectHit results with a different logo. Jeeves is just trying to bury the memory of DirectHit a little deeper. (And not quite suceeding: the results are still served from msn.directhit.com and the related-searches block after the listings is still labeled "Direct Hit Related Searches".)

angiolo is right about something being up at askjeeves.com, but I'm not seeing Teoma SERPs there: It looks to me like aj.com is serving DirectHit data straight up, and repeating the results (results 1-10 are the same as results 11-20, which are the same as results 21-30, and so on). The repetition isn't happening for searches with fewer than 10 results.

teoma.com is similarly screwy: Underneath the "Relevant web pages" graphic, it currently says "Note: We are unable to display Teoma results at this time. These are our alternative results." Then it shows... the DirectHit.com results.

Edited to add: I noticed this after posting: Teoma's "Suggsestions to narrow your search" lists the same searches as the "Direct Hit Related Searches" on msn.directhit.com. I never thought to compare those before. Did anybody else?

My best (and only) guess is that we've caught Jeeves/Teoma in the middle of trying to integrate DirectHit results into the other sites. I wouldn't be surprised if it was all cleared up in a few hours.

[angiolo]

Now results from Teoma are different, but at the time I wrote there was the same SERP on Directhit, Askjeews and Hotbot.

Askjeevs shows the same Teoma results.

Probably, when I checked the serp, Teoma showed "old" directhit results, in a strange manner (same results on any page).

Directhit is still alive and shows on the first 10 results of Hotbot and on "Top 10 most popular site" on MSN.

[mbauser2]

Directhit is still alive and shows on the first 10 results of Hotbot and on "Top 10 most popular site" on MSN.

I think we all knew that already.

For the record, I'm also seen recent (within the last 30 days) directhit-influenced traffic from:

apple.directhit.com    Sherlock (?) 
comet.directhit.com    CometCursor  
dictionary.directhit.com   dictionary.com 
dogpile.directhit.com   dogpile.com 
excite.directhit.com    webcrawler.com 
megadirectory.directhit.com  megaspider.com 
webster.directhit.com   m-w.com 

britannica.directhit.com is still pingable, but I haven't seen any traffic from them lately, and I don't have an account there to check the SERPs.

Some of the click-tracking URLs in Excite.com SERPs include the string "src=DH_excite_SRCH", suggesting they're still running something through DirectHit's system.

DirectHit is buried, but it's not dead. If you've got any pages ranking well in the DH database, you will still see a small stream of traffic from DH partner sites.

"Small" is relative, of course. msn.directhit.com, by itself, is sending me 3 times as much traffic as teoma.com. Add up all the directhit.com subdomains, and DH is still sending me five times the traffic teoma.com does.