janardan
03-12-2001, 08:49/08:49AM
Not sure this is the right forum, but there is no special area for Lycos.
I'm trying to figure out how Lycos ranks sites. My understanding is that Lycos shows Fast's results as web page results (at the bottom of each return page there is a legend "portions powered by Fast"). Sometimes it shows category matches (under the webpage matches) and in this case "portions powered by DMOZ" legend is added. Everything works nice if the popular terms are searched. With Overture's pages come first. But when I checked the seach term which is not very popular (in my case, I needed 'polymer beads'), I discovered that the results were completely different - not a single webpage in Lycos repeated Fast's results. Moreover, when I checked the pages that were first positions in Lycos, most of them were absent in Fast database. There were some other pages under the same domain in Fast, but not exacly the URL I searched. Other pages just showed the sought URL as being present on the resulted page. All the results I checked were present in ODP, and as Fast didn't give them as URL findings, they are obviously absent in Fast database.
How can I interpret all this? I can assume that either Lycos' crawler follows the links on the pages which are in Fast database, but were not spidered by Fast's crawler, which is doubtful. Or it takes these results from other source (presumably, from DMOZ, but uses meta descriptions [or first snippets of text if there's no meta description] instead of DMOZ listings). But if so, why the legend shows "portions powered by Fast"? Weird.
:confused:
I'm trying to figure out how Lycos ranks sites. My understanding is that Lycos shows Fast's results as web page results (at the bottom of each return page there is a legend "portions powered by Fast"). Sometimes it shows category matches (under the webpage matches) and in this case "portions powered by DMOZ" legend is added. Everything works nice if the popular terms are searched. With Overture's pages come first. But when I checked the seach term which is not very popular (in my case, I needed 'polymer beads'), I discovered that the results were completely different - not a single webpage in Lycos repeated Fast's results. Moreover, when I checked the pages that were first positions in Lycos, most of them were absent in Fast database. There were some other pages under the same domain in Fast, but not exacly the URL I searched. Other pages just showed the sought URL as being present on the resulted page. All the results I checked were present in ODP, and as Fast didn't give them as URL findings, they are obviously absent in Fast database.
How can I interpret all this? I can assume that either Lycos' crawler follows the links on the pages which are in Fast database, but were not spidered by Fast's crawler, which is doubtful. Or it takes these results from other source (presumably, from DMOZ, but uses meta descriptions [or first snippets of text if there's no meta description] instead of DMOZ listings). But if so, why the legend shows "portions powered by Fast"? Weird.
:confused: