Alta Vista coverage much smaller than thought?

[Kyle Banerjee]

> ......  One of their conclusions was that web designers should make
> their sites wide and shallow (in terms of hierarchy, not content!),
> since some search engines only look at the top few levels--believe four
> deep was about the max..........  By the time you get to the gems of
> information, you're deeper than the search engines' knowbots ever dug. 
> Probably didn't get "catalogued."  

	I'm not sure this is good advice. As far as I can tell, Alta
Vista's main goal is to showcase Digital products, not catalog the web.
Hardware capacity limits how many sites Alta Vista can index. If adding
unindexed sites makes the search engine run slowly (frustrating users and
making Digital look bad), my guess is that the sites don't get indexed --
wherever they are in the hierarchy. Planning web pages to conform with
search engines' needs is like planning events to conform with
photographers' needs -- probably a bit of this should be done, but not too
much. Providing good access to bad web sites does nobody a service. 


kyle

___________________________________________________________________
Kyle Banerjee     banerjek at ucs.orst.edu     Oregon State University
333 Valley Library, Corvallis, OR 97331               (541)737-7262
	      http://www.orst.edu/~banerjek/