March 1st, 2004

(Taken from Tim Mayer's post over at Webmasterworld.com)

"The primary means of generating our index is via our free crawl, using our new Yahoo! Slurp crawler."

Yahoo! Slurp discovers pages by following links on the web. We update our index with a daily crawl to gather newly created and fast-changing URLs, as well as our main crawl which updates our index incrementally twice per week.

We supplement this free crawl with the paid inclusion program, which allows us to add dynamic database content and other content that we could not otherwise discover and crawl. Currently less than 1% of our index is content that is included via our inclusion programs.

Our paid inclusion programs provide a superior way for sites to interact with us in a clearly structured fashion. These sites get the following benefits:

1) Control over which URLs they include in the index
2) Frequent refresh
3) Clearly defined way to interact with us
4) Quality review and consultation (feed customers)
5) Detailed reporting to track and optimize performance
6) Customer service

Participation in Yahoo!'s paid inclusion program does not guarantee rank in the search results. URLs are ranked in search results in the same way as all other URLs from the free crawl. The key drivers of ranking are keyword-specific relevance and site quality, as assessed by our regular search relevance algorithms with input from the quality review process.

(Note that Inktomi Index Connect clients are receiving Yahoo! Search traffic going forward, and Inktomi Search Submit customers are receiving a free trial of Yahoo! traffic until 4/15/04.)

We will also be launching free URL submission during the week of 3/1. This service allows content providers to suggest that the crawler should visit a site during the main crawl cycle. This service is different than paid inclusion in two ways:

1) There is no guarantee that we will crawl
2) Yahoo Slurp will follow links from specific URL's

This service will reside on the Yahoo.com site and be accessible via a Yahoo! login. This service has been available for the AltaVista and Alltheweb Indices previously and the tradition will continue with Yahoo! Search."

Source: Search Engine Lowdown and Webmaster World

        

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