Latest News: 3/21 - AltaVista is cracking down on all forms of Spamming their Index. If you are using methods which are against their rules, your pages will be removed and your domain will be banned from their index.

3/13 - Still getting the "Too many URLs" error? Wait at least 25 minutes and resubmit again. We have found by waiting at least this amount of time allows our URLs to be accepted by AltaVista.

3/1 - Pages are being added faster - in about a week. Updates usually occur on Sunday night's. If you have your own web server, make sure you do not do any maintenance on your server then, as you could risk being missed by Scooter. Scooter is visiting about 10 million pages a day.

2/24 - "Too Many URLs Submitted..." Are you getting this error when attempting to list your site? You aren't alone. We do NOT believe this is "domain blocking" by AltaVista, rather their submission process is jammed or not in proper working order.

From AltaVista: "If being found via search engines is important to your business, be very careful about where you have your pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers, you could wind up being penalized or excluded simply because the underlying IP address for the service is the same for all the virtual domains it includes."

Our requests for verification of the above from AltaVista have gone unanswered. Just for fun we submitted AltaVista's own page and received the error. Something isn't quite right here folks. Hang tight, we'll get through it.

Getting Listed with AOL Search/NetFind (0.6% YTD - 0.7% 1999 Market Share)

Time to Index: Approximately two weeks.

Latest News: AOL's Search is driven by the ODP (The Open Directory Project).

Getting Listed with Excite (4.1% YTD - 15.6% 1999 Market Share)

Time to Index: Approximately 1-5 months.
Last Known Update to Index: March 15, 2000

Latest News: 3/1 - We have had many of our clients get into Excite last month and have seen trails of their spider on our sites as well, even though none of our pages have been indexed.

1/14 -- New domains which we have submitted in October have finally been placed in the index.

Getting Listed with Google (3.5% YTD - N/A 1999 Market Share)

Time to Index: Approximately two weeks.

Latest News: Only enter your main domain, do not submit each page. Google's spider will crawl through your site.

Getting Listed with GoTo.com (3.7% YTD - 2.3% 1999 Market Share)

Time to Index: Less than one week after opening an account.

Latest News: GoTo.com is a paid service.

Time to Index: Approximately four - eight weeks.
Lastest Update to Inktomi Results: March 8, 2000
Lastest Update to Direct Hit Results: March 23, 2000

Latest News: 4/4 - HotBot has been dropping the Description tag at random from sites.

3/21 - Including ODP pages in it's search results BEFORE listings from Inktomi.

Current Order:

• ODP Categories
• Direct Hit Top Ten
• ODP
• Inktomi

Currently indexing dynamically built pages.

Inktomi powered.

Getting Listed with Infoseek/Go Network (1.5% YTD - 7.6% 1999 Market Share)

Time to Index: Within six weeks.

Latest News: 3/18 - Infoseek's "Add URL" page is back on-line.

3/1 - Infoseek's add URL page has not been operational for us most of the month. They are now giving an option to submit via e-mail, but we have not seen any of our submissions be listed by this method. Many other submission companies are reporting the same problems.

2/1 -- Go.com is going through major changes and it will affect Infoseek over the next few months. Due to Disney's short-sightedness with Infoseek, they have taken it from our favorite search engine in the past and turned it into one of the "forgotten" engines on the web. Their current market share stands about 3 - 4%. Look for Infoseek to slowly "go away" during this year. Infoseek used to have "instant indexing" - when you submitted your site into their index, it appeared in their index in just a few minutes. Then someone at Disney was concerned with potential spammers of their index, eliminated the instant indexing, limited the database size and changed the system to one that rewarded "popularity".

The current rumor is that Infoseek will move to a paid model, similar to GoTo.com.

1/5 -- "At this time we do not appreciably upweight matches on URL paths --- so having a very explicit domain will not help a site much," said Jan Pedersen, Go's Director of Search.

We haven't seen any new domains listed with Infoseek since November 1999. Infoseek now supports the <!-- startindex --> and <!-- stopindex --> tags. This tag will allow you to have full control over what Infoseek indexes on your page and what it does not. This is NOT similar to the Robots Meta Tag which only allowed you to specify if an entire page could be indexed. This tag allows you to exclude certain portions of the page.