[WEB4LIB] Re: Submitting websites to search engines

[Charles P. Hobbs]

On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, sean dreilinger wrote:

> Hanan Cohen wrote:
> > I would like to direct you to an article titled "Search Sites' Shocking
> > Secrets -- They Stink. They're Getting Worse. And It's Deliberate" at
> > http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2432.html .
> 
> this editorial gives us a provocative helping of search engine issues.
> this *may* be a vehicle to drive traffic to other online articles by
> this publisher. the 18 responses from readers are of special interest to
> library webmeisters and information professionals. the reader comments
> reveal user expectations of web-based internet search services, and
> highlight the statements about information services users find the most
> disturbing (factual or otherwise :-).


What does everyone think about Altavista? It's just about the only one I
use anymore. It's searching features (particularly advanced searching)
seem to be the most flexible and powerful (you can combine phrase and word
searches, by judicious use of the +, - and quotes). 

I use it for all sorts of searches, both technical (medical, scientific)
and non-technical (i.e. looking for company web sites, entertainment
figures, etc.) and can generally find what I'm looking for (within the
first few hits, anyway) without feeling that I'm being "steered" to some
particular web site because someone paid Altavista or something like that.

The only thing I don't like is when it pulls up extra-large (>100 K)
"pages" in response to a search. Usually these are not web pages as such
but "server logs" and other information of somewhat limited interest.
Occasionally, a pornographic web site will also be a page with a large
amount of text--usually from a 300K English dictionary in the meta tags,
just to get it to show up in the search engine.