[thelist] too many bots

[Madhu Menon]

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