How good is ATW really these days?

[heini]

A lot of people claim they have changed to ATW as of lately - on this board they have received more praise than all other engines apart from Google.

Personally I find them to be good, but not as good as, say, 6 months ago.

- indexing: slow. New pages often take quite a while, new sites sometimes forever. Index doesn't seem to grow anymore either.

- spider intelligence: has been better. Redirects seem to pose great problems, language detection shows a huge error margin.

- ranking: erratic. Some fine serps, some lousy, some overall good serps with painful blackouts inbetween.

- Options: not bad. Advanced search still very good. News search not state of the art anymore, looks like they have done nothing on that end for at least a year or so. Pics search looks good. Video, Audio is a minefield, understandable they don't put much effort in it. FTP search: thing of the past, nice that they still do it though.

- query intelligence: nothing new either. Same old half baked clustering appears to be the last remnants of John Lervik's grand visions.

Y! - either you put some effort in ATW or let it die already! This has been a great engine with lots of good ideas - do you want to keep up that legacy or do you want to produce another walking corpse?

[Essex_boy]

Ive switched to ATW and find the searches as accurate as post Austin Google Advanced search is superb.

Love it

[Brad]

>>Personally I find them to be good, but not as good as, say, 6 months ago.

>>- indexing: slow. New pages often take quite a while, new sites sometimes forever. Index doesn't seem to grow anymore either.

It seems the same to me too. They don't seem to be agressively spidering anymore. Maybe they are just stripping parts out of it and bolting them on Ink?

I suppose once Yahoo makes it's decision on what to use, the final fate of ATW will be decided.

[beren]

I agree that their Advanced Search options are very useful. I don't know why they bother with Audio and Video search though: my experiences with those searches have typically turned up sparse results.

As far as general SERPS, I don't like them as much as I once did. I used to think they were as good as Google, but I get a lot of irrelevant results these days.

[jbgilbert]

How good is ATW?

Not good enough for it's owner (Yahoo) to use it in their results -- they are going with Inktomi.

It the owner considers it "second fiddle", then look for it to die a slow death.

[engine]

As usual, heini's got it nailed.

For me, the major let down is the freshness of the data. Apart from that it works well for me.

I agree, it will become less useful if it doesn't get some fuel in the tank and useless if the wheels are stripped off the car.

Come on Y! I'll show you how to fill up with fuel.

[Spica]

One of the reasons why I like ATW is that it is the only major search engine that, for a certain KW combination that I often check, does not list one particular site at # 1 and #2. This site uses techniques that I despise to reach this high level of exposure, including all sorts of link exchange programs and guestbooks entries. It also has hidden text and hidden links in 1 x 1 pixel images. Why, oh why can’t other search engines detect this type of spam, I don’t get it.