The "freshness guarantee" of newly overhauled Web search engine AltaVista has turned sour.
When AltaVista launched its revamped search service on 25 October, it promised "no search site will have fresher results than AltaVista." But the change has produced the opposite result. AltaVista's attempts to re-index the site's content have erased thousands of new listings.
"It's the second time they've made promises about freshness, and to have them fail once again -- it's annoying and misleading," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.
Any date-specific search -- accessible through AltaVista’s advanced search feature -- illustrates the problem. A search query confined to the date range 10 October to 1 November produced zero results for the search term "MP3," one of the most searched-for terms on the Web.
Performing a similar search on a single day in September produced close to four thousand new pages for MP3. Wired News ran both searches Monday morning.
"They've made specific claims and they're not meeting them," Sullivan said, noting that the same problem occurred in June after a smaller redesign. Sullivan said the earlier problems were widely reported in search engine discussion forums and that he also experienced problems himself.
Webmasters who register their sites with AltaVista were promised that the new listings would instantaneously be made available to site searches under the new program. But many webmasters say they can't get their sites to appear at all.
"Most of my sites, and most of our client's sites, were deleted from AltaVista," said Max Fenton, a Web designer from Charlottesville, Virginia. "It seems the AltaVista index reverted to sometime around 10 September, as no returns for any given search have a 'last-modified' date later than that."
"This has been traumatic to our traffic," said Fenton. "As a Web developer I do my best to develop worthwhile content, but I depend on search engines for viewers."
Jim Olsson, who maintains a site in Sweden, said his site listings evaporated from the service when the revised service debuted. Although his site represents only a part-time endeavor, for many others like him the impact can be dramatic.
"Some sites are living on being found by search engines, and some of them are heavily dependent on sites like AltaVista," Olsson said. "They should have posted on the portal that they have problems with their revamp.... If you have a problem with your product, normally you go out and tell people."
"I don't think it's a question of misleading our users," said Tracy Roberts, director of marketing for AltaVista Search. "We are in the process of putting the [new index] up there, and we are in process of putting URLs back in.... This is what our goal is here."
Roberts declined to say how many missing sites there were, but said they would remain missing until AltaVista completes a new index. She said the problem occurred during a service overhaul in which an incomplete index overwrote the previous listing.
AltaVista started restoring sites that were left out in the changeover on Monday, according to Roberts, who said the company's new indexing technology would prevent such mistakes from happening again.
