Search engines / some interesting things

Since I put up the donor manager website, I haven't given too much thought to search engine placement. I figured, sure, it would be nice if people could find the site through a search, but I really expected most people to come through word of mouth referrals or through a link on some other website.

And, I still think that is true.

But, I ran across an interesting artice on a www.webmasterworld.com. I don't recall how I ended up there but found some fascinating discussions.

One headline that caught my eye was about MSN's new search engine. The title of the article is "MSN Bot on the Prowl with a Healthy Appetite."

Microsoft has decided to compete with Google and Yahoo and get into the search engine business in a big way. Their search engine "bot" or "spider" has been "crawling" the internet for some time building an index of pages in anticipation of the launch of their service sometime in the fall of 2004.

Now, the interesting thing is that the MSN search engine is indexing the entire DM web site every day, to the tune of about 3 megs of data... every day! That is 10 times more than Google or Yahoo are indexing.

Every day, at least for the past few weeks.

I'm impressed. If they are doing that elsewhere, when they launch this puppy, it's going to be something to see. No one every accused Bill Gates of doing anything half-way, except perhaps getting the bugs out of Windows and Office without calling a bug fix an upgrade and charging for it.

But, that's a topic for another post some day.

At any rate, the agressiveness of Microsoft in searching the internet is very impressive. Hey, they found my little site, and I didn't pay anyone $ 49.95 to submit it for me.

If I were Google, I'd be a bit concerned. There's a new kid in town.