Posts tagged: SEARCH

First in an occasional series where I show how old I am by reminiscing about the ’90s World Wide Web.

Do you remember the Altavista search engine? I don’t mean the thing that Yahoo bought and buried. I mean the original 1990s version.

Altavista was an exciting game-changer when it arrived at the end of 1995. Web search had a lot of room for improvement. Altavista’s two standout attributes that crushed the competition (e.g. WebCrawler) were its size and its speed.

A few years ago I started collecting Google searches that uncovered common web authoring mistakes or hosting snafus. You won’t believe how many pages on the web are titled “Welcome to Adobe GoLive,” for example. Amaze your friends and scare your clients with other examples from the full list.

Google has launched a blog search tool. Given how long it took them to get around to it, it’s rather underwhelming. Also, I’m seeing a lot of spam blogs in the results – despite my recent attempts to mock such sites into oblivion they seem to be flourishing. Some Craigslist-style flagging options (also now offered by some blog hosting services) are sorely needed.

Perhaps Microsoft is gearing up for combat in the web search index size wars. From August stats for e-scribe.com:

 	12.77% 	msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
 	3.61% 	Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
 	3.34% 	Yahoo! Slurp

So 12.77% of the domain’s hits for August came from MSNbot. When I drill down into the detail, it looks like the bot has a particular affinity for RSS feeds.