New Developments in Search Engines -- A Warning
As of June 17, 1997 this warning was becoming dated.
Lycos (the current "best") service, no longer had a problem.
Infoseek, Excite and Alta Vista (second best) were thought to be overcoming their problems. As of July 30, 1997, it appears that they have concluded that the problems are virtues.
Hot Bot and Webcrawler remained pretty much worthless.
As of October 7, 1998, this warning was variable (issues still existed and were cycling).
There have been new developments with several search engines.
First, the majority are now starting to limit the total number of pages indexed from any one domain (such as the first 800 or first 500 pages listed) or are limiting the number of pages they index from any one domain (such as a limit of 50 indexed every two weeks). However, if you submit the pages, one at a time, most search engines are beginning to accept hand submitted pages, even if they do not search them out.
This means that if you decide to use a free hosting service, such as GeoCities or Triad, you can expect the site to never be indexed (what is going to happen to sites currently indexed is an interesting question. Several engines actually seem to report a decline in the number of GeoCities sites listed). Further, if you add a web site to incidental web space provided as part of your ISP account, such as that offered by Concentric Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe and others, you may be 15 to 20 years from being indexed. The major search engines are committed to trying to solve the later problem (and two appear to have done so), but it remains a concern and a real issue as several search engines appear to have concluded that the "problem" is not a problem after all.
Second, as a form of triage, many engines are shortening the number of attempts and the time they give their spiders to index a page -- with the result that if your service provider has slow response times, your url may be dropped from the index and treated as no longer existing rather than being indexed. A number of registered sites disappeared from major search engines during the AOL slow down due to this new procedure. CompuServe lost a number of listings during routine early morning maintenance.
Finally, several Indexes (such as Yahoo) appear to now limit the number of URLs indexed from any one sub-domain, so that if your firm has the domain name http://ISP.com/account name/_your firm_ and also resells the excess space to several other local firmst (such as _their firm_ and _other firm_), the last to submit may not be listed. This does not appear to be a problem for domain name accounts.
These are three important considerations and reasons to seriously consider
paying the approximately $350.00 a year your own domain on a hosting service
will cost if you are planning on implimenting a new web site ($50.00 a year
to InterNic, $10.00 to $25.00 a month to the hosting service). They
are also reasons to consider moving your web site from its current location
(if you use a free or ISP related or discount service) to a dedicated high
quality location (e.g. Hway.net).
For an update, see search1.htm
There are also other good reasons to use your own domain on a good hosting service.
| Update:
To keep track of which web hosting services are the "best" check out the following two web sites that keep track of and that rate web hosting services: http://webresources.tierranet.com/topwebhosts.html They use similar criteria, but their ratings differ substantially. Worth a visit to start your thinking. |
As with all things on the Web, three months from now will be the same as three years in normal time and everything may have completely changed again. After all, none of these problems existed in October of 1996 and several of them did not exist until February of 1997. One is new to April, two to June, and some to July of 1997.
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