Who Powers NineMSN these days?

Is it still Inktomi?

[Pixeleyes]

I'm trying to find out about the Inktomi crawler that provides Ninemsn web results and why my site has not been listed in Ninemsn, MSN or Yahoo.com or Yahoo.com.au via the free submission forms. Google picked the same site up ages ago and has indexed all pages.

I realise there are no guarantee's but there have never been in the past either... and my sites would still get listed in less time.

Has anyone listed a site using either Yahoo free submit or MSN free submit and had it included within the last 3 months? (I submitted mine in April and it's now July).

I rang Ninemsn here in Australia to find out what's happening but they seem to know less than I do.

They tell me Inktomi powers MSN who powers NineMSN and that there's no need to list a site because Inktomi finds everything whether it's listed or linked or not.

I want to know why Yahoo owned Inktomi would be providing web search results to MSN when they are competitors. I asked if it's the all new Inktomi/Yahoo crawler or maybe the old one? I asked if it is actually being updated at all because my site hasn't been listed. Maybe the submission page is broken for Australia? The strange thing is that my site is listed in the new BETA MSN version but not the 'usual' MSN or Ninemsn results. On one day, Yahoo.com showed my site WAS listed (with results identical to Google's) ... a few days later it was gone again.

This site [hitwise.com.au...] says Ninemsn web results come directly from Inktomi but I'm not really sure about that graph's accuracy now because that contradicts what Ninemsn told me. Also I thought Looksmart stopped providing directory results to NineMSN (maybe that happened in July 04 tho).

Seems like all the info I read/hear is conflicting ~ it would be really good to hear from anyone who knows from experience what the go is here as Ninemsn in Australia seem to know very little about their search results due to apparent difficulties getting info directly from Inktomi.

[Pixeleyes]

Eek. I guess there is always the possibility that my site is not good enough or breaks the rules somehow. I just re-read some Yahoo help pages and they say they index every 2-4 weeks in which case 3 months with no listing seems like a definite snubbing from Yahoo(?) ;-(

[anallawalla]

Welcome to Webmasterworld!

I wouldn't worry about NineMSN not knowing much about Inktomi. As long as you get linked from some relevant directories, Inktomi's spider will visit within a couple of months or less if you are lucky. Yahoo's free submit form is mostly miss and not much hit. That includes the so-called backdoor, which I tried once to no avail. MSN's free submit is probably more reliable - I say "probably" because it's hard to know whether the visit came from the submission or a link from another site.

[Pixeleyes]

Hi Anallawalla ;-) Thanks for your reply. Google lists two directorys as backlinks. Yahoo lists one directory and one website when I do a search on the url I'm trying to get listed. Does that not count as enough of a links base to get the actual site included in the search results for Yahoo and MSN? Also, do you know if it is exactly the same Inktomi crawler that provides both MSN and Yahoo web search results? Thanks in advance for your help with this.

[anallawalla]

Pixeleyes,

I am not clear on what you said, but you should get better replies in the Yahoo forum here since the linking and spidering questions are global. Yes, there is no "local" Inktomi spider.

Ash

[Pixeleyes]

Thanks Ash ;-)