Re: [Summary-Talk] What qualifies as a search engine?

[Jason Linhart <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Luc Dubois wrote:
> 
> The following URLs are search engines, but when I use a filter to
> limit a report (monthly referring domains) to search engines, they
> don't appear in the report.
> - find.in.gr
> - (suche.)web.de
> - www.anazitisis.gr
> 
> Is there a way to update this locally by the (adventurous) user?

I will add these to Summary's list of known search engines. There are
new search engines almost every day, we try but we don't manage to get
them all.

> Also, for the MSN family of search engines I noticed a strange
> situation: msn.it, msn.de, msn.fr, etc are all recognized as search
> engines, but msn.com is not (anymore, it used to be), instead only
> search.msn.com is recognized as a search engine. For AOL we have a
> similar situation. So it seems that for the worldwide versions, the
> preference goes to <SEARCH.domain.com>, while for the localized
> version, the simple <domain.tld> is used.

This is more complicated situation. MSN has content that is not search
engine related as well as a search engine. They treat the sub-domains
differently in the msn.com domain than they do in the localized
versions. Worse, they have been changing this usage around over the years.

Summary tries to put the MSN search engine into search.msn.com. And
other thinks, like Hotmail, into msn.com. Summary gets it right for
Microsoft's current domain name usage, and for some periods in the past,
but there were times when MSN did domain names differently that Summary
won't correctly recognize.

There is no workaround at the moment.

> Contrary to the principle above, we find YAHOO.com defined as a
> search engine, but SEARCH.yahoo.com is not (but is used to be).
> Moreover, no distinction is made for the localized version (which for
> Yahoo take a URL in the form of (e.g) <DE.yahoo.com> or <IT.yahoo.com>).

Again, Yahoo has a collection of content, not all of which is search
engine related. We try to track Yahoo's domain name usage. Whereas MSN
always redirects search traffic to search.msn.com, Yahoo normally leaves
search traffic in yahoo.com. Summary counts yahoo.com, search.yahoo.com,
dir.yahoo.com, and google.yahoo.com as search engines. While other
sub-domains at Yahoo are generally not counted as search engines.

I will add detection of localized versions of Yahoo.com to our wish list
for possible inclusion in a future version.

Jason

-- 
Jason@xxxxxxxxxxx
--
Dr. Seuss books . . . can be read and enjoyed on several levels. For
example, 'One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish' can be deconstructed
as a searing indictment of the narrow-minded binary counting system.
   -- Peter van der Linden, Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets
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