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What I'm interested in is,
I was submitting to them but I stopped. I'm also advising clients to wait and see.
True or not, the general sentiment is that LookSmart never cared for webmasters (unless they were bent over), and that sentiment may have played a role in their present situation, at least to the extent that many people declined to play ball with LookSmart.
Every search engine is free to exclude whomever they want from their public relations. Yet, as the sun sets on LookSmart and it's history of poor webmaster relations, is Inktomi stepping up to become the latest company webmasters love to hate? The coming months will tell.
My guess is that they will have to drop the paid inclusion thing, because it reduces the number of sites in their database.
The smaller the number of sites in their database, the less likely they can return the best results.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Dude, try doing some research on a database that 'supposedly' contained the worst "search engine optimizers" (from the INK perspective) that was leaked (again, supposedly) and blasted out in some search engine newsletter by this guy [searchengineworld.com].
You might also consider that rumors nonwithstanding, for a while, INK was 1st in line with 'webmaster ire' as they pioneered the whole "pay for spidering" concept.
And then - never proved it to be a fully viable business model / and sold their stuff off in parts & the engine business went to Yahoo (as INK was a bit more than that...ultraseek, some media software stuff, a caching system, etc).
Stepping up? I think the right idea here is "regaining" ;) and considering the noise now about the FTC potentially taking a closer look at the whole "wink wink nudge nudge" PFI doesn't affect rankings (cough) program, INK is definitely stepping in something. (Imho) Or about to be dropped in it.
If you assume that Ink wants to challenge G, then wouldn't it have to crawl as much of the net as possible? ... The smaller the number of sites in their database, the less likely they can return the best results.
You are absolutely correct!
I have seen examples where Ink has crawled only 1/3 of several high profile sites, as compared to Google. And I have seen only several examples and they all are less crawled in Ink than in Google.
If high profile sites are missing so many pages in Ink, we all can understand the amount of sites and pages it must be missing overall. And that simply shows where it stands in comparision with the mighty Google.
If Ink ever wants to match Google, my say would be to first crawl the entire web and then improve the algorithm. I am certain Yahoo would do something positive.
If you assume that Ink wants to challenge G, then wouldn't it have to crawl as much of the net as possible? ... The smaller the number of sites in their database, the less likely they can return the best results.
May not be correct. Lets imagaine, for example, that AltaVista crawled twice as many pages as Google, would this make make their results more relevant? I don't think it would - the algorithm of AV is not up to the quality of G.
I would recommend that they improve the algorithm before crawling all other pages. If there is not enough relevance, no-one will use them if they have 50 pages or 50 billion pages to search through.
The problem with stating that you simply need more pages to be a better engine is false because if every search started with 200 results of spam, afiliates and viagra adverts, you would stop using the search engine and go to a competitor.
Google is where they are now for one reason and one reason alone:
*** RELEVANCE ***
(It was not the largest engine when it was becoming popular - so what made it popular? Obviously not the number of pages)
P.S. When the algorithms are perfected - the time to crawl more pages starts...so when you search for rare items/words the obscure pages can be found. This is what Google has done, firstly improve alogrithm, secondly crawl everything it can.
Also see:
[webmasterworld.com...]
About Inktomi and algorithms
I think the glitch is being sorted!
Well, just checked, and MINE's still not fixed yet. Where's that attorney's address?... What's he charge to send a copy of that letter KaneTrain?
Inktomi have got some bright people there. They wouldn't include PFI in the top 10 if they could help it.
That, my friends, is where the PPC revenue listings go...;)
