What the!??!

[Determined]

Must admidt, in the past 6 months have spent so much time and energy on AltaVista and Inktomi...I've never even looked at alltheweb.com had no idea what it was about. So this morning I decide to take a break from frustration and jump in to see what it's about and maybe look at building some pages for it....

And what to my wondering eyes should appear but my little ol' page parked at number 2! Non optimized, index2 page (main page after the splash page) full of crappy javascript at the top lowering my keyword density and all. Strike me dead...but I was a little dissapointed! (Knocking on everything that's wood) No playing tag with this one (and no learning either, on this one anyway)

So the question is... how do I get all my potential customers to stop using AV and start using FAST???

[RealSpices]

You can't change the what SE the surfer potentially will use.

Anyway, FAST has an agreement with Lycos and (jump in Brett if i'm off base) will be using their results soon. Lycos is already using FAST's image search features.

[Determined]

Hehehe, was just kidding about the last point RealSpices!

And you're saying that Lycos will be using Fast's results? (Be still my beating heart)

[RealSpices]

Yup, if you go to FAST and search for an image, you wind up at Lycos.. I also read on Danny Sullivan's site that Lycos will be using FAST's results in addition to their own, DH's, and ODP's. Should be fun to watch..

[Brett_Tabke]

Thanks for the tip, I didn't get a copy this month for some reason.

[RealSpices]

You know, now that you mention it, I didn't get his newsletter this month either. His site is on my "rounds" and FAST info is "In the News"..

[Brett_Tabke]

The biggest problem with Fast is relavancy. They are so spammed out right now. If they would just start flagging any nonstandard title as Spam (such as the thousands of titles in the 80-150character range), relavancy would sky rocket.

Yes, Fast is doing the image and FTP search thing for lycos and has been for two years. They also do the ftp spidering for filemine and dozens of others.

I do like what Fast is trying to do, and I am assimilating all info on them.

[Brett_Tabke]

This thread is interesting for historical note. Look at how far Fast has come in the last year.

A year ago, they were quite "spammy" in their results. A quick look today reveals more accurate results and far less spam.

Have you noticed the difference?

[2_much]

Relevancy has definitely improved, especially during the past couple of months. IMO, they still have room for improvement though.
It seems that less competitive keywords are increasingly relevant, but the more competitive categories still contain some spam (not as much as a few months ago).
Something to note is that Fast's results (via alltheweb and lycos) differ from greatly from most of the other engines. What I mean by this is that in some keywords, there are a few sites that are in the top 10 of EVERY engine except alltheweb. Don't know what to make of this.
Although we have some good rankings with alltheweb and lycos, referrals are very very few, only a trickle of visitors a week for top 10 sites that get good traffic from other engines (especially google).

[Brett_Tabke]

Oh, there are quite a few dupes, but nothing like between Alta and Google. I was playing with the power search page earlier trying to get a fell for how well it could filter stuff, and honestly? It is better than Googles filters.