cadabra.com webcrawler...

replacing Ink on Overture.com?

[bodine]

Seen it crawl my site for the first time recently. Looks like cadabra.com points to overture.com (which is why I posted this here). I could not find out anything else about it. Overture replacing Ink, maybe? Anybody know anything? I wonder when the Overture/Inktomi agreement expires?

[added]64.15.193.12;cadabra.com webcrawler[/added]

[edited by: bodine at 2:24 am (utc) on July 25, 2002]

[littleman]

You may be onto something.
According to This old press reliese [webmasterworld.com] Cadabra was bought out by goto in 2000.

If Overture is dumping Inktomi it's going to be another devastating blow to Ink.

[edited by: littleman at 1:56 am (utc) on July 25, 2002]

[littleman]

So, what's the bot and IP?

[willtell]

They may have been bought out but the regristration does not indicate that. It may be someone just redirecting the web site to Overture to make one think its legit.

Check out the Verisign Whois on this.

[Weblamer]

Are the sites of yours that it is crawling e-commerce sites? I belive the article I read stated that the bot was supposed to crawl sites to collect products for some sort of comparison. Shrug. I have not seen anything on overture like this, but it's my guess that it is something they are putting together for the near future.

[rubik]

I have been wondering about this for quite some time now, but have never brought it up until now.

The spidering is done through the paid overture listings, and not just the ones that can be walked to from the home page. I track all ppc activity on my sites using cookies and referring URL, and IP address. I noticed a large quantity of hits one day from the same IP range (64.15.193.x) so I looked it up, it was cadabra's IP range. The extremely unusual twist was that the hits came to search terms that are EXTREMELY refined (ones that just get the bare minimum 25 clicks in the given month I set it the term up, and not necessarily 25 per month every month (as I call them "under the radar terms"). Seach terms that someone would have had to type in, or be privy to the overture master list to find.

This is where it gets really interesting, if you research into this further, you will also find an interesting tie-in with overture. Do the "who is" search for cadabra.com and tesserae.com (another offender) and you will see something quite interesting in the administrative contact section. Donald Geddis - name doesn't mean much - but check out the e-mail address. Go to the web site that the e-mail points to (geddis.org). Check out his resume... VP of R & D,
VP of Technology, Shopping - for Overture/Goto.

Now look even deeper into your bill from overture... the "under the radar terms" that I bid .05 for (that usually don't get clicks) have the exact number of occurrances in my bill, as I tracked coming in from this cadabra "spider".

Is Cadabra.com in the Overtue affiliate program? I would love to find this in a list from Overture, but it doesn't exist.

Why am I being charged for these "visits"?

Is this "insider fraud"?

Anyone else this anal about ppc as me and even notice?

Last one -
What is Overture going to do about it?

[bodine]

Are the sites of yours that it is crawling e-commerce sites?...but it's my guess that it is something they are putting together for the near future.

Yes. It crawled all of the links listed in my Overture account, and also the ones that I have on my home page.

Another thought. Maybe they are a little more ambitious than just replacing the backfill. Maybe they want to offer competition to Inktomi, Google, Fast, etc. Google can offer both PPC service AND good search results...maybe Overture wants to offer that "full service" too.:o

rubik: I looked up all of that stuff too. I am also very anal when it comes to tracking PPC-- custom written perl script. I was not charged the clicks, as you were, however (which is why I did not think it was fraud). If this were fraud, maybe Overture realized it, and blocked that block of IP addresses. What date did you first see this crawler? Looking back in my logs, I see that May 14th was the first date. It stopped for a few hours and started again on May 15th. I do not see any activity in June. July 16th is when it started again. July 22 is the last date.

Strange, nonetheless...maybe we will know more soon.

[Weblamer]

Just a quick not, july 17th and july 22 are the last times of activity the bot made on my site. I doubled checked my clicks on those dates, but they did not seem to corospond with what the bot crawled, so I do not see any fraud issues on my end.

Now im really curious about this bot, though.

[willtell]

Because of the strange nature of this and the address is owned by an individual not a company, we have banned them from accessing our site.

If they are connected to Overture, this is not a normal way for a company to act.

[bodine]

willtell: You've done it now! All bids on Overture will cost you double. :)

...not a normal way for a company to act.

This is Overture we are talking about. Very little they do is normal.

[Weblamer]

According to Overture, it is not their bot. I sent a polite message to them asking about it, and I received this reply:

'=================
Thank you for contacting Overture.
At this time, Overture does not utilize any spider or bot program.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can be of any further
assistance.
'================

However, in another post on webmasterworld, a guy said he called overture, and they did indeed claim it was thier bot.

What's going on here?

[rubik]

Here's another one I dug out that I am paying for, anyone seen this one before?
63.79.100.2 cambot.cscoe.accenture.com
or
63.79.100.8 gypsy.cscoe.accenture.com

For an update, Overture "magically" removed the click costs for the cadabra spider in my reports.

I am still quite curious though.

They should call a spade a spade, and give us the truth.

Weblamer,
do you recall the thread that referenced the contact made to Overture?

[Weblamer]

Here it was:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[willtell]

I don't understand. From what I've seen there is no connection between this bot and Overture. What are you seeing that I am mssing?

[Weblamer]

Whoever runs it, it's back on my site today.

[Mike_Mackin]

>Whoever runs it

I have a call into the guy who runs it.
SM me with any domain / domains you would like the bot to avoid.

[Weblamer]

If ya know who runs it, then what is it for?

[bodine]

...and how does it know all of the keywords I bid on?

[coconutz]

When I called Overture customer service on 7/17/02 it took quite a bit of coaxing, but they did tell me that cadabra.com was purchased by them, and that the spider was used to verify their partners SERP's, and that the spidering would continue.

[Weblamer]

Hmm. Overture blantenly lied to me. Nice.

[Crazy_Fool]

the wayback machine is very helpful sometimes ...

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