AskJeeves Site Submit to end (Finally)

• Jun. 24, 2004

A few months ago, when Yahoo! launched its own branded search engine, it took some people by surprise. Many were thinking that it would simply roll the Inktomi database into the search results and re-brand them. Even though they had their own crawler working for the previous few months, it still caught some off guard when Inktomi was left out of the mix.
 
 Also at that time, they announced a paid inclusion program whereby webmasters could pay to guarantee their site would be crawled on a regular basis. There was no guarantee of rankings, only a guaranteed indexing. This was apparently to help site owners whose content was buried deep in a site to get indexed.
 
 Shortly before Yahoo! made this announcement, Ask Jeeves stepped into the ring to say that they thought paid inclusion was a bad idea, and that they would soon be discontinuing their own paid program called Site Submit. Site Submit, via Teoma, has been the only way to get into Ask and its partner sites.
 
 Finally, a few months later, Ask has firmed up a date when the paid submission program will end.
 
 On September 30th, of this year you will no longer have to pay to get into Ask and its sites. A company spokesperson says that they are confident that their crawler can now effectively take over and index on it's own without site owners and webmasters requesting inclusion.
 
 The new strategy will affect all Ask properties including AskJeeves,Teoma, Iwon, MyWay and Excite.
 
 There appears to be no mention of a free submit option however. Apparently, Ask expects that their crawler can find new content on its own through links it finds on pages in its current database.
 
 Ask has received criticism in the past because it doesn't crawl as fast as other engines such as Google. Therefore the content isn't as fresh and rankings become stale. They have addressed this issue, according to the spokesperson as they expect the crawler will continue to improve its indexing abilities over time.
 
 Rob Sullivan
 Production Manager
 Searchengineposition.com
 Enquiro.com