Alltheweb & Altavista Free Submit Gone

I've got a bad, bad feeling about this ....

[internetheaven]

Both the free submission sections of Alltheweb and Altavista have gone. Only this message remains:

"Please note, we are currently making improvements to our free site submission service, which is temporarily unavailable. Please check back here frequently. We will soon be re-launching free site submit."

Yeah, right. We know what Yahoo's last improvement was ...

It hasn't been mentioned for some time, and Yahoo have never been forthcoming about future developments (well sometimes their forthcoming but misleading) but if you think about it, Yahoo SiteMatch is run by Overture. Overture is shown on all three sites - Yahoo, Alltheweb and Altavista. Recently the free submission section of Alltheweb was changed to match Altavista's. The crossbranding and the changes occurring at exactly the same time leads me to believe that a merger of indexes is in the pipeline.

There is the fact that Yahoo launched their new search system on Yahoo, their highly trafficked site, and had to make corrections constantly for the first week or so.
Why didn't they try out their new algorithm on Alltheweb first? Its highly trafficked enough to get results yet won't spoil their Yahoo image. I think they still care about Alltheweb and Altavista, especially their indexes, and that we're going to see a big shift now that the dust has settled on the Yahoo switch.

[tigger]

poor old AV does it really matter if they are no longer taking in sites, I've had sites in the top 3 for months with next to no traffic

[Marcia]

I'd say give them the benefit of the doubt and bear with them, rather than jump to conclusions. It's entirely possible that the back end is getting worked on to integrate and meantime, there's no reason not to use the Yahoo free submit, which will most likely accomplish the same thing.

[internetheaven]

Marcia - "and meantime, there's no reason not to use the Yahoo free submit, which will most likely accomplish the same thing."

Does this mean you believe all three indexes will eventually be rolled into one?

[Marcia]

I believe that it's wasteful of resources to have a redundancy of effort when it's all actually Yahoo. I do, however, think that Yahoo is now in a perfect position to have themselves a nice little "test kitchen" and apply different recipes to the ingredients.

Just conjecture on my part, but I think the idea has some interesting possibilities, particularly in the area of geo-targeting and local search.

[Brad]

There was an article or interview published recently with somebody from Yahoo (Tim?) stating that AV and ATW will soon be using the same database as Yahoo, but using different algo's. It should give each one unique results for the same query.

This should be interesting.

[pleeker]

There was an article or interview published recently with somebody from Yahoo (Tim?) stating that AV and ATW will soon be using the same database as Yahoo, but using different algo's. It should give each one unique results for the same query.

Yes, I read that, too. All three will come from the Yahoo search engine, but AV and ATW will be used as a testing ground of sorts.

Now where did I read that?......

[WebGuerrilla]

Yahoo is not going to operate three separate crawlers/databases. The technology from all their properties will ultimately be combined into one product.

That process takes time. The fact that they are no longer taking free submissions at AV/ATW and they are now taking them at Y! is probably a good indication that the intergration process is is moving along without too many problems.

[twebdonny]

Allthesites.com ditto

[Arctrust]

Hey Guys

Can someone please explain to me the logic to all this because I keep missing it.....

Please bear with me....

AV - independent till now
ATW - independent till now
Yahoo Search - when they first started advertising it was GOOGLE!

Now G is gone
AV will be integrated
ATW will be integrated
INK will be the engine - of sorts?

So.... when Y started advertising Y Search they were touting Google and now if Google is gone, AltaVista - gone, All The Web - gone AND - with no prior experience as to what we should expect and with what they are going to do.... why begin a campaign to charge PPC, PFI and who knows what else? if no webmaster has anything to base future traffic on....

In other words.... they wipe the slate clean.
Ask for money
Implement all plans 45 days later

And for now we have what? - Nothing

Do my ramblings make any sense?

Thanks

ARC

[Brad]

Well Arctrust, I think you have too many issues in there.

It seems to me that AV's major faults were small database and it did not spider as deep as the others. Now I don't know if this is exactly how they intend to do it, but I think applying the AV algo to a really big DB could be very interesting. :)

This is a massive integration and changeover. Yahoo is more concerned that the experience be good for searchers and less worried about what SEO's and webmasters think during this process, and rightly so. We just have to give them a chance to do it.