At 1:20 PM +0100 12/8/97, Bernard Frit wrote:
Bad news for mailing lists archive site administrators.
Just doing a research on AltaVista, I surprisingly noticed
that the sites I'm currently administrating had been removed
from AltaVista indexes.
After reading AltaVista FAQ, it seems that they had
implemented some software which automatically removes every
site which have "a lot" of links pointing to the same URL.
They did it to avoid some sites to be overindexed within
their archives.
I have to admit, that although I archive 3 lists with Mhonarc, I think this
is not a bad idea. I would actually like someone like AltaVista to have a
separate search engine for mailing list archives. I can't tell you how much
of a pain it is to do searches for information, and come up with primarily
mailing list archives, which have messages that are rarely informative. A
separate system, if it arises, like DejaNews would be quite preferable, in
my view. I hope that mailing list archive managers won't jump to try and
get around this.
Hopefully as well, the main page of your archive is still present in the
searches. Then, people could still browse (and search?) your archive. (I've
been meaning to implement a search engine on mine for a while now).
Michelle
-------------------------
Michelle Murrain, Ph.D.
mpm(_at_)javanet(_dot_)com
http://www.ursa-minor.com/michelle
