Forum Moderators: open
I haven't been using AV for searching for a while now... and just because they've started random updates to their DB doesn't mean I'll be going back any time soon.
>There is no way I'm going to be able to crack that and auto submit
No problem LM they [AV] will ask you to cross their palm with silver and unlock the doors for you.
I think they are penalising the "free submits" anyhow.
[added]
"You have now sumbitted the limit of 5 URLs. Click here to return to the AltaVista homepage. If you want to submit more URLs, please go back to the original AddURL page, and enter the new Submission Code. If you want to submit many URLs at once, you can use the bulk submission service at AltaVista Webmaster Services [webmaster.altavista.com]"
The webmaster services link seems to be down, nice of them to provide a way of submiting more than 5 URL's. I wonder if they require a "donation".......
Optical Character Recognition.
You could conceivably have a macro or script locate the image, do a screen shot, dump it into an optical character recognition application (say, Corel OCR-Trace), convert it to text, then copy-and-paste it into the appropriate textbox.
By randomizing the font for each character, the code generator makes it hard to do accurate image-to-text conversion. Oh, and you think it's an accident that they put the letters against a dark beige background? Uh-uh. Same principle.
If it were standard fonts, we could crack it in a couple hours with simple OCR routines. In fact, I think there is a perl OCR module floating around? (edit: whoops, mentioned above...didn't read the whole thread first)
Why they don't just tag the thing to a form submission is beyond me. Change the address of the add url page from the main page, then the followup page. Rotate it to a "map" or a random image url...no fuss.
Also, notice anything interesting here: (the filetype doesn't match the mime type which also doesn't match the image header-descriptor as GIF):
+++GET 9+++
GET /cgi-bin?image.gif54081 HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.71 (Windows 98;US) Opera 3.62 [en]
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/png, */*
Referer: [add-url.altavista.com...]
Cookie: AV_USERKEY=AVS037fa3a9bd86780a2020130018546
Pragma: no-cache
Host: add-url.altavista.com
Browser reload detected...
+++RESP 9+++
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 06:21:12 GMT
Server: AV/1.0.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Length: 918
Content-type: image/bmp
+++CLOSE 9+++
It's more exciting than watching Speed Disk unfragment your hard drive... :)
New submissions are getting in *very* quickly and if they can keep this up and tweak the relevance they will be able to attack Googles Achilles heel, stale results.
It looks like the battle between those at AV who believe in a quality search service and those in the past who believed in the portal approach has been won.
The software engineers have the upper hand but they will have to pay their way, expect an Ink like service very soon but I believe they will still keep the free submit option open.
It is hard to see how AV can be on anything but a winner here. I share the hopes that it can increase relevancy and turnaround time.
I was really starting to favour Google, but NFFC is spot-on about its achilles heel. Search relevancy on google is highly praised but there must be an extent to which relevancy must also take into account the fact that results from two months ago are no longer relevant.
If I can get results on Alta Vista under 30 days old then it looks like Google might be ditched at the altar.
Date:11:56:25 (GMT) 03/16/01
IP Address:209.73.164.50
HostName:bigip1-snat.sv.av.com
Browser/OS:Scooter/1.0
With AV's traffic diminishing and the instability of their database, Ive been worried about where they were heading!
Ive always loved AV and although some have advised to focus SEO elsewhere, I cant.
I think this little tricks very clever and shows a clear intent on their part to improve the quality of their database. That can only be good for us in the long term
If this means that AV starts to index submissions rapidly, and starts to deep crawl a bit, then I'm personally happy to see the change, as weird as it is.
I'm also happier with the algo than I've been in a long time. Seems like the fokls at AV are serious about a quality search engine. Now how about some traffic from AV -- that would help the most.
Did you take the recent "survey" at Altavista? It was a carefully laid out survey to see if users could deduce the difference between boughten ads and search results. How could that make AV any better? Atleast with most of the other engines, you know what is or isn't an advertisment (sans lycos and msn).
Well, that makes me feel stupid! I enjoy watching defrag!
I'm going to guess that this idea will become a trend and we will see all the search engines using it. It's brilliant yet annoying.
Does anyone else remember when games used to have an unlock code which required you to type in "the third word in the second sentence of the fourth paragraph" of the manual?
>>"the third word in the second sentence of the fourth paragraph"
That would be preferable to their current guess-the-character ransom note scheme. At least the owners' manuals in question generally used legible type.
Jill ;)
I do too... I wasn't putting it down. Ever since I got a 20-gig drive, though, Speed Disk has been so undependable it's taken all the fun out of it.
I think I'll go submit something to AV now.
The international AltaVista's have not adopted the new system yet, but there is some question about where submissions to them end up. In a local index or in the global index? Facts are gathered in a discussion in the European Forum. [webmasterworld.com]
