COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Certain below used words and phrases may be registered trademarks of their respective owners
DISCLAMER: This report does not claim any particular accuracy. Your experience may vary or be altogether completely different.
Intro
My wife is an artist. It is a pretty tough place to be in if you do not know someone close to the high elves of art establishment. But the Internet is a perfect "equalizer" these days, almost like some crafts by Samuel Colt were in 19th century, right? Just get a website going and herds of eager visitors will eventually come pouring in. Before such notoriety comes, however, one should get listed with the search engines.
Our Experiences
My wife's been going through get-search-engines-to-know-your-website exercise since Feb 8th. At that pretty much the same time we submitted her site's URL to all engines we could find that provided such service: MSN, Yahoo, Gigablast, and Google. Next is a brief account of how fast and in which way search engines responded.
MSN
The first to come crawling were MSN and Gigablast - very same day. MSN quickly sniffed a few pages and departed. We were quite surprised to see that the site showed up in MSN search next day after MSN bot crawled the site. However, MSN postponed a more thorough site examination until later. It came a few days after initial crawl and scanned pages down to a third level (front page being 1st, pages referenced from front page 2nd, etc). Search results again, were updated next day following the crawl. Since then MSN bot has been quite regular visitor: every 3-4 days.
Gigablast
Gigablast's bot showed up the same day we submitted the site to it. Gigablast seems to have different agents to discover pages and to crawl them: there's a "bot" and there's a "spider" - which one does what - I don't really know. Gigablast have been very polite and would hit the site at the rate of one hit per about five seconds. That being also a factor in overall indexing speed. Being that polite takes a considerable time to crawl populated sites. It's still not quite out of my wife's website yet, and her's is not particularly populated. So site does not show up in Gigablast search just yet...
Yahoo
Yahoo was next with its slurp - a day after site submission. It glanced at a few pages briefly and left. However, site did not show up in search results until a few days later. Yahoo, however, has yet to dive beyond the depths of the first level. It shows up occasionally and scans pages it already visited, as if to make sure they are still there... It seems Yahoo applies a similar strategy to crawling as MSN - a brief, cursory scan, followed some time later by more inquisitive inspection of one or two levels deeper...
The star of the Internet search came last - as frequently stars do - with a rigorous scan from the start, similar to that of Gigablast, but hitting more frequently. Around next day site showed in the Google search, however just the URL and nothing else. Even that would disappear every now and then. It took about 4-5 days al together to finish site crawl and about another five for more meaningful site links to appear in the search. It's kind of strange with Google, one day your site shows up in multitude of URLs, the other nothing comes up at all.
Conclusion
MSN showed so far the quickest crawl->update index turnaround. Yahoo is next. Then Google in a little bit strange way. Gigablast is not quite done yet.
Links
Look up my wife's website information on:
My wife's website:

No comments:
Post a Comment