When Spiders Attack

No, my room is not under attack from spiders, and neither do I have arachnophobia, unlike certain red-haired fictional characters. However, Rach’s increasingly stupid ideas about his (hypothetical) website might have me developing RACHnophobia (n. fear of Rachits) very soon.

Anyway, after shifting to my new URL www.AnkurB.info, my biggest fear was a 4-8 week wait again for my new URLs to be indexed, like it had taken initially with my original URL. Unlike what Rach wrongly believed (even after reading The Google Story, as he himself admitted), searches are not in real-time; basically they’re ‘indexed’ into databases maintained by the top search engines. This mining for data is done by processes called ‘spiders’, because they crawl on the Web (hope you get the connection) for information. Maybe it’s just the competitive search environment, or the fact that it’s a separate domain now (I don’t believe their trash that they give equal importance to everything), it got indexed by Yahoo! Slurp (Yahoo!’s spider, it was the first to visit), Googlebot, and the Inktomi spider (the one used by MSN Search) within a day of me changing the URL. Yes, I had submitted to them, but man was this a fast response time. Most pages might not reflect the new URL in their searches until some time though.

I have got zero PageRank (when I last checked) on my new domain, thankfully, it was not a ‘no PageRank’. It WILL take me some time to regain my PageRank and the moderately high placement I was getting on Yahoo! Search for some of my posts, but as Rach said, it’s good that I shifted now, because traffic can only grow, and it’s have been much more irritating to be off searches later on. After all, 80% of my site traffic comes through search engines.

Then, take Technorati for example. Even though I had links pointing to my old URL from a few blogs I know, it never showed those, and gave me a low rank. After getting my domain, I resubmitted – it shows no links obviously, but surprisingly, it gave me a higher rank right away after registering!

I hope my readers won’t get inconvenienced during this perioad searching for posts on my blahg, because the built-in search in the Blogger navbar, plainly, sucks. It NEVER gets anything right, simply showing loads and loads of mostly unrelated posts. That’s because it no longer works in the older Blogger did – in that, they used Google BlogSearch. Yes, sometimes, posts took time to show up, but at least they were accurate! The current navbar search works on simply looking for words in posts, not relevance. Another change for the worse in new Blogger, apart from messy feeds. What’s up with Google! People (unfairly) claim that Yahoo! destroyed GeoCities, but I say that Google has messed up Blogger after buying it from Pyra.