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It looks to me like Inktomi is partnering with portal and content management systems companies to provide very fast inclusion and competitive ranking of sites that have been torn down and rebuilt from scratch-- the very sites that would tend to rank poorly in Google due to torn up link structure leading to low Pagerank. I analyzed several very large sites that have switched to content management systems recently (within the past few years) and they rank low relative to their peers in Google - all those static variant pages being replaced with asp, jsp, cfm, etc either broke the inlinks or redirected them such that google's algo didn't pass along the link weight to the destination page. In a few cases, even the index page got moved to a different location so references to the domain root were broken, resulting in terrible PR loss for entire sites (moving the index from www.*.com/index.htm to www.*.com/home/index.asp
The consequence of this breakdown in link structure and pagerank is that very large, modern, high quality sites have trouble ranking well in Google for a long time, especially if redirects are employed that diminish the need of external sites to fix linkrot. Thus, excellent content can get hidden deep in Google SERPs while MSN and other Ink search partners will serve it up on top, and very soon after redesigns if customers choose an Inktomi affiliated product.
Inktomi's site info seems to frame their search technology as intranet-focused but the presentations I saw and the competitive opportunity suggest otherwise-- they're applying this strategy to Web search as well. Of course, organizations that use these content management & portal solutions have money and would be good customers for Ink to court. Ink also provides clear advantages to it's software partners, which depend on complete teardown and rebuild to implement their solutions-- which is almost a guarantee of poor rank in Google. With such a symbiotic interests, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine Ink's software partners, Microsoft included, would implement their designs in a way that purposely diminished Pagerank and the quality of Google while boosting the quality of and steering business to Inktomi (and of course, MSN).
Just a thought.
Additionally, if they were searching for something that they knew could find on only one large site, a high %age would use the special site: syntax, or some other advanced search feature. That would solve many of the problems
Do the "big boys" really want to cut themselves adrift from Google, regardless of Ink might promise them? If I had to put money on "Ink or Google - Most likely SE to benefit my business" right now, I'd take Google at odds-on
If the INK strategy is to focus on sites that dont traditionally rank on Google though, it would be flawed. Given google's continuous improvement, I would think that if this sub optimal indexing of content management and dynamic content is a real problem, they would solve it given time.
There may also be an advantage in downgrading *some* pages that are dynamically delivered. Generally if something needs to be dynamically delivered there is some greater chance that the content and material is less carefully designed for web presentation, changes enough to be worthless indexing, or provides multiple views on the same raw content, leading to multiple content problems.
So in some, but definately not all ways, the more careful indexing of dynamic generated of software generated and formatted content could be an advantage.
Yep, I think INK's strategy has always been to corporate uses, competing more directly with Fast than Google therefore, though Google's intranet "box" is a recent entrant in that area.
The dimension I'm talking about has been referred to as "Mom and Pop" sites, but even this has a commercial slant to it. I'm speaking mainly here of informational sites by hobbyists or issue-oriented citizens or tiny groups. I'm talking non-commercial, nonprofit -- the sort of stuff that was really the backbone of the Web in the early days.
I fit this description. I've been on the Web since 1995, and my big site does okay in Google because Google lists nearly 1000 incoming links to my home page. But I've had two huge problems with PageRank. One is that my PR 7 prevented a deep crawl for nearly two years, even after converting everything to static pages. Googlebot would get to 40,000 pages every month, but only in the last three months has it gotten beyond 90,000.
The second problem is that these internal pages end up with a PR 0 because I don't have enough up-front PageRank to distribute to them. This wipes out the ranking on them.
This is my big site, mind you -- the one that I considered to be doing okay in Google. Inktomi came along three days ago with their update, and all of a sudden the hits for my inside PR 0 pages were referred by Inktomi at twice the rate that they were referred by Google. This is because I'm not PR zeroed in Inktomi. My search terms are extremely "niche," but they were pushed down so far by the PR 0 that even the fact that I'm highly specialized didn't overcome this. Before three days ago, Google had Inktomi beat on these inside pages by four-to-one.
All it took for Inktomi to make me a happy camper was a) crawl my pages, and b) don't use PageRank. That's not asking much, is it?
But I really want to mention the other four sites I've started since 1995. These are informational, issue-oriented sites. Let me tell you folks, it is extremely difficult to build up traffic on these sites to the point where you get more than 30 visitors per day. Most of these four extra sites have been up for two years now. I also have a huge advantage -- I can link to them from my big site, and I can get a colleague to link from her big site. It is very rough going. They all get crawled by Google, but they just don't get much traffic.
This is where Inktomi can really shine over Google. There's hope for the little guy through Inktomi, but very little hope through Google.
tall troll- from the research I've read, the general public doesn't use advanced search features, the vast majority use single keywords and scan just the first SERP for results. IMO, people tend to be frantic or thoughtless when searching the Web (a user characteristic that I think led to MSN's building market share after Microsoft embedded MSN search capability into IE).
Ink is already easy to access via MSN/IE. Now, Ink could be improving quality in a way that strategically diminishes the quality of Google, to serve the interests of its partners and shared customers, in order to generate revenue. I don't know if the big boys want to cut themselves adrift of GG but I do know several already have in order to implement content management. Could be the decision-makers for these enterprise systems are IT managers that understand structured info systems and internal cost-benefit but not necessarily how the Web really works? BTW, the "big boys" would include government, schools and universities with huge repositories of quality information, not just companies. If people had difficulty finding such information on Google, in effect Google's quality would be lower.
If Ink & content management / portal partners such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and others were able to weaken Google results, Ink/MSN (Ink/Yahoo?) could expand market share by offering more comprehensive results to search customers. And they'd make money doing it-- everyone would make money.
Unless Google were to stay ahead of the game somehow. :)
Yes, but Google attracts a fairly tech-savvy user base, who will use the adv. search features more frequently than the general web population. Certainly a fair whack of the google referrals I see have evidence of advanced search behaviour, using multiple search terms, "quote marks" for exact matching, and various features from the adv. search page
>> BTW, the "big boys" would include government, schools and universities
I don't think thats an issue so much. Information from those sources has a tendency to be required specifically. I think searchers would find the site first (search on the domain name, or type-in) then start trying to find stuff. If you are looking for govermental type info, you likely know which department cobers it, so you would look for their site (its one approach, at least)
I know a guy who used to run a UK university site, I'll tap him up, see if I can confirm or deny whether that behaviour really exists in quantity
