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Which technology are they using? My guess would be Teoma, since it is the best of the group.
And the first thing they should have done ( or perhaps did) was to clean the DH db, as it was one of the worst I've ever seen...I think even AV has a better db, and perhaps Ink as well.
So to answer the question, I'd say submit again to DH, and see what happens. But their value is wanning, I think, since Lycos no longer features their results, and they play 2nd fiddle where they play at all (eg, MSN, where you have to click to go to the cobranded page. they don't automatically appear, like INk or Looksmart.)
Hope that helps, Cheers.
I've seen AskJeeves come by recently, so I assume something is brewing. But not a clue about any of it.
They wrote back about two weeks later saying they no longer accept free submissions and to contact Ask for a paid submission information.
The DH db has only 15% of the listings in had in early Dec due to cleaning. It is still using it's own technology for the SE. If you submit to DH or Teoma chances are neither spider will visit you. This is because they get ask to do as much of the work as possible. Ask has more server power and can cope with the work load.
DH ARE accepting non-paying submittals, however, don't hold your breath on being delt with (their about 4 month behind and it's slow work).
If you want to appear in either Inktomi, Ask, DH or Teoma the best route in is DMOZ.
I must say, Direct Hit's results are a pile of poop.
1.You can submit to DH for free but it be an age before you are submitted (probably more than a year).
2.If you submit to DH or Teoma they may not spider your site directly. Some of the submission are being past to ASK. Therefore, ask will crawl you then send the results back to either DH or Teoma. This is not the case every time however.
Or to put it another way, there's a new kid in town, goes by the name of Teoma, the sort of kid you need to be friends with!
DH look to be almost dead and burid and the traffic potential from Ask is huge, just go to their site [and ask.co.uk] they are almost "pure search". Teoma is without a doubt in my mind the next "big thing".
Ask is probably using Teoma's search results and it's definitely worth subscribing to Ask?
What if one is already on Teoma (with low page rank). Will paid submission to Ask get better results?
I'm already on DMOZ with an excellent ranking but it hasn't got me any good results on Direct Hit or Teoma.
I realise, nothing is set in stone!
Objective: You want to be Ask.
The are 4 ways in.
1. Direct submission
2. Overture (the top 2 positions)
3. Teoma
4. Direct Hit (which will use ask's spiders to crawl your site).
FYI
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Something BIG happened a DH yesterday. I got 304 visitors and over 200 stayed on the site for over 15mins, which means they weren't bots or people testing the database. Can anyone get any answers? The girl I know is on holiday.
cfel - Prompted by your post, I took a look, and yes, something is very different. I did a search for terms relevant to a client site that's never been listed in DH but does well elsewhere... and is now doing well in the new AskJeeves database.
The first time I ran the search I got: "There are no results available for your search request. Please try again."
The second time I ran the search, I got a full set of results, not the same as the AskJeeves results, with the client site ranking #1. Since this was DH, I decided I'd better click on it and not come back for a while, so I can't report in depth, but I like what I see. ;)
Does subscribing to 'Ask' get one onto Direct Hit?
namniboose - I'm guessing that whatever the answer was when you posted your question, it's different now, but it hasn't settled down. I don't mean to squash comment on your question, though, if anybody has any ideas.
rogerd - It's still only showing 10 results... no second page.
I don't know whether backus did it or not, but I'm now seeing additional pages of results with more pages from my sites. Haven't yet compared the SERPs with other engines to see what they might resemble.
