MSN Madness

[markymark]

Here's a puzzler I can't figure out. I have a client who has both the .co.uk and .com domains permanently pointed at the same space. I don't remember the technical info for how this is done, but essentially there are one lot of pages, but if you go to thisdomain.com, all the subsequent pages are seen as thisdomain.com/anotherpage.html and if you go to thisdomain.co.uk, the subsequent pages are thisdomain.co.uk/anotherpage.html .

With me, so far ? Right, well this is the weird bit. I have submitted thisdomain.co.uk through PositionTech and for a couple of weeks it was showing up in MSN, etc. as thisdomain.co.uk . All fine and dandy.

Now however it is showing up as thisdomain.com in MSN.com and MSN.co.uk, appearing as thisdomain.co.uk in AOL.co.uk (for both worldwide and UK searches) but as thisdomain.com in AOL.com.

And this is what is strange. All Ink engines use the same database, right ? So how come I am seeing the .com extension in the US search engines and the .co.uk in the UK ones - surely it would be one or the other.

[highman]

Markymark,

How is the site positioned here: http://169.207.238.189/search/search.pl

and which domain is listed?

>All Ink engines use the same database, right ?

Havnt got a great deal of time at the moment but, NNFC at WMW has it sorted, try
this (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum2/562.htm) which may help

Cheers

[Alan Perkins]

All Ink engines use the same database, right?
My understanding is that Ink has four databases:

Best of Web
Eurocluster
Asia Pacific
GEN3 (the big one)

and that these can be mixed with the content partners' own DBs as required. I believe most searches go to a smaller cluster first, and GEN3 is only used when insufficient results are provided by the appropriate small cluster.

I'm not sure which clusters the various partners you mentioned would use, but it seems obvious that the European partners would use Eurocluster and the American partners wouldn't use Eurocluster...

[markymark]

Ah ha, the fog lifts. Thanks Highman for that link. I feel a little foolish, this is the sort of thing I should already know, but there we are.