Zdenek Burian • detail of a Tylosaurus 1.15.03 The most impressive performer so far is Lycos. A search on "rubber dinosaurs" finds 191 sites, with Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs in the Number Two spot (some daffy music site is number one). I'd say that Lycos has a most perceptive search engine. Lycos searches a crawled database from FAST, which managed to find Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs without any help from me. Next best is AlltheWeb, the home of the FAST database - "now searching 2.1 billion web documents". Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs comes up Number Three of 207 listings .... not quite as perspicacious as Lycos, but still mighty good. AltaVista's performance is puzzling. Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs doesn't show up at all among the 181 sites found in a search for "rubber dinosaurs", but it does come up in a search for "realm of rubber dinosaurs" (and is the only site found under that search term). Google? Nothing. AskJeeves? Zip. Yahoo? Nada. NorthernLight? Pffftt. Overture? Same. InfoSpace? Ditto. InfoSpace includes a meta-search engine, which sends your search to other search engines and web directories, and displays their results. InfoSpace's own search didn't find Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs but it eventually found the site by asking FAST. However, InfoSpace failed to find anything when searching "realm of rubber dinosaurs" even though the FAST database has it, and Lycos and AlltheWeb can find it there .... the exact inverse of AltaVista, which can find it (in its own crawled database) under "realm of rubber dinosaurs" but not under "rubber dinosaurs". 3.30.03 Lycos is still doing well, showing this site at # 1 when searching on "rubber dinosaurs," and it handles "realm of rubber dinosaurs" well also. Brief tests imply that all pages are well indexed. Google has finally gotten its electronic butt in gear, showing this site at # 3 when searching on "rubber dinosaurs." Otherwise its performance appears to be more or less identical to that of Lycos. AltaVista hasn't changed - it finds the site fine when searching for "realm of rubber dinosaurs," but "rubber dinosaurs" seems to baffle it. It uses my meta title for the page as the page description, just as it should. Lycos and Google don't do it that way, though. They extract text from the page, rather than from the HTML (where the meta title resides), to synthesize a description. AltaVista doesn't seem to have all my pages as well indexed as do Lycos and Google. 2.15.04 After neglecting this site for almost a year, it's time to get my dinos in gear and finish off some of these sections. The big news in the search engine department is that it all has to start over again. Ouch. I have moved the main site to ProHosting, as Tripod now buries visitors in banner ads and multiple popups. ProHosting just has banner ads, and none too many of those, either. 12.09.04 Now have a real site, with a real domain name. So it's back to Ground Zero in the search databases, as the ProHosting site and the mirror at 1AccessHost won't be updated. Let's see how long it takes Google, Yahoo Search, AltaVista, and Lycos to find it this time. 1.10.05 They've had a month to find it, let's see how they did.
Searches by msn, lycos, and yahoo do pretty well. There's some irrelevant crap listed before my site, but at least I'm on the first page, where I should be. Altavista is a bit out of date, but its algorithms are working OK. But google is nowheresville. I get quite a few links from google image search, but they all go to the old Tripod site. I haven't had any images there for months. How often does google trawl for images? Based on this mini-test, I'd say that google is well on the way to getting knocked off the top shelf, at least in the search-engine department. Updates are just too slow, particularly in the Images section, where about half the image thumbnails link to long-dead sites. And if a site dedicated solely to Rubber Dinosaurs doesn't come up pretty damn near the top in a search for "rubber dinosaurs," google's algorithms need some serious tweaking. Old standby lycos has google beat all hollow, and relative newcomers yahoo and msn do too. 4.25.05 Google has finally put in an appearance. In fact the Googlebots are the busiest of the crawlers on my sites. Recently I've had 1066 hits from Googlebot. The next busiest is Inktomi Slurp (used by Yahoo), at 214. The NSMBot is at 153, and AskJeeves checks in at a mere 102. Those are the biggies. However, Google doesn't list Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs in any reasonable search. Sites with links to Realm come up, but not Realm itself. This is odd. Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, MSNSearch, AllTheWeb, etc. put Realm just about where it should be. |
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