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Search Engine Spam, continued...

LocalEyes' penetration of AltaVista doesn't stop there.

All other search engines which derive their data from AltaVista are also affected, including LookSmart (Reader's Digest) and Metacrawler. Visitors to Excite are encountering much the same experience when looking for "camera stores."

A visit to the LocalEyes sites invites users to access still another search engine to seek the camera stores for a particular town. When I tested out their search engine for New York City on November 16th, it couldn't find B&H Photo in New York City. (See screen capture #2). So I looked through all 18 "neighborhoods" LocalEyes has broken New York City into. Heck, I live in Seattle and haven't got the faintest idea of which neighborhood B&H Photo is located in. I finally found them in the "London Terrace-Old Chelsea neighborhood" and can see my mistake. I forgot to add the word Video to their name. So much for LocalEyes robust intuitive search engine and the geography lesson on New York City.



Couldn't find B&H Photo in New York City!		 LocalEyes invites camera stores and other categories of businesses to enter their own URL and other business information - in short they're asking the retail trade to improve the database for them. Frankly, there are already too many sites on the Web which invite others to do the work for them.

LocalEyes is currently using a database provided by American Business Information, one of their partners in this venture.Would you consider calling this spam - the very thing LocalEyes says it worked so hard to eliminate? AltaVista seems to think it qualifies as spam. Personally, I think calling it spam is being charitable.

I first contacted AltaVista's Brian Reid and AltaVista's Feedback email address on October 18th to report this and ask for their intervention. Reid is the director of Digital's Network Systems Laboratory in Palo Alto where AltaVista is located; he's also listed as the systems administrator
on InterNic.

Reid responded within a matter of hours:

"I'll see what I can do. Digital tries hard to prevent this sort of thing. Thank you for your message." - 10/18/97

AltaVista responded 3 days later:
"We are working on better ways of detecting and protecting against spamming of the index. We will implement them as soon as possible. In the meantime, maybe a nice letter to the webmaster of the site would be in order. Thank you for your patience. - AV Support" 10/21/97

Well, it seems I was going to get some action!

Several webmasters from other sites also contacted AltaVista, among them Gretchen Geyer, webmaster for Omega.Satter, the enlarger and photo equipment manufacturer.

"You've got a real problem here. Someone is abusing your index by registering this stuff, because when you try to search for "camera stores," this is what comes up. I don't think this is a service to your users!

I'm the webmaster of Omega.Satter.com (a photo industry website), and it really irks me to see stuff like this happen, especially since I am a law-abiding "netizen." - Gretchen Geyer 10/19/97

Geyer received exactly the same canned response - "We are working on better ways of detecting and protecting against spamming of the index. We will implement them as soon as possible....."

Days turned into weeks...

(previous)


Design & Publishing . / . WEB . / . Rip-Off . / . Search Engine Spam

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