Inktomi instability
- Jul. 25, 2000
It has been hard to categorize everything that has been happening with Inktomi and their partners lately. Very little is known because there have been no press releases, but it is believed that Inktomi has been re-shuffling the web pages that are indexed in their temporary and permanent databases. Between July 12-15th, several people started to report that their page rankings had been dropped completely from the Inktomi Search engines (MSN, Hotbot, Canada.com, Anzwers, etc..).
MSN dropping pages
Over the past 10 days, the Search engine forums have been flooded with concerns and reports of pages being dropped from MSN. While a good listing in Looksmart is a key to ranking well in MSN, the results pulled from Inktomi are also very important for a lot of people. Up until July 21st any resubmission efforts via Canada.com seemed to be futile. After several polite emails to Inktomi's support staff, reports came in on the forums that Inktomi were indeed reworking their database and the problem would be fixed in a few days. On July 21st Inktomi was active again, and their various spiders (i.e Slurp) have been spotted in log files since then. Although not all of the pages dropped from MSN and other Inktomi partners have been restored, many pages have been. The add URL page on Canada.com was very slow last week, but is once again working well. Several unique pages that I submitted to Inktomi via Canada.com on Friday, July 21st were ranking in Hotbot as of July 24th. With all of this activity, and Inktomi's third-quarter net income being double what Wall Street had expected (link to article), we can anticipate more changes over the coming months.Jason Lane
jason@searchengineposition.comFurther Resources - Links
Tags:
