[thelist] too many bots
Madhu Menon
webguru at vsnl.net
Fri Dec 14 08:02:32 CST 2001
At 04:42 PM 12/14/2001, Mike typed these words:
>is anyone else getting a huge number of hits from
>altavista bots?
>
>On one site i've 25 in one week!
>
>they look like this...
>RDNS: bigip1a-snat.sv.av.com
Oh, Altavista is finally indexing web pages again? That's good news,
considering that their indexes have been stagnating for several months.
(Reference: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7630946.html )
I don't know why they bother any more. The battle of the search engines has
been won by Google, who can't seem to do anything wrong. Pity. I still
remember how they were the first "real" search engine on the Net (as
opposed to Yahoo, which was just a directory.)
Then Altavista went "portal" with a vengeance, and totally messed up their
site (anyone remember stupid hyperlinks like "shop for 'removing coffee
stains' at BarnesAndNobel.com' ?) Years later, they learned their lesson
and introduced a home page without all the e-commerce plugs. They even
introduced a plain text search called Raging Search. (www.raging.com) But
it was too late.
There's a lesson in this. Don't try to be everything to everyone. It just
doesn't work.
I'm curious: how many of you still use Altavista as your primary search
engine, if you use it at all?
Regards,
Madhu
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Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net
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