AltaVista drops local databases

August 29 2001, updated August 30 and September 1 2001

AltaVista is now abandoning the system with special local search engine databases for national or regional versions of its search sites. This has caused some concern in the Dutch search engine community.

AltaVista has not updated the local databases for over three months in 22 countries, including the UK, Holland, Germany, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Spain, India and Korea. Only a few sites were added after April 29. Websites who have paid for inclusion in the AltaVista database (Express Inclusion) have not been included in these local databases.

Voelspriet.nl, a new Dutch site about search engines, published the results of an investigation on August 28. It was quoted on Dutch radio, television and the biggest news websites.

Editor Henk van Ess discovered that local databases weren't updated for 15 weeks in none of the non-US versions of AltaVista. "They just stopped indexing after April 29. But they still asked for money for inclusion in the local database," he says. "The free submission was still open, although AltaVista knew they wouldn't include any more new entries. The public was fooled.''

His report fits with observations made in the search engine optimization community. Lately it has become impossible to add new sites to the local indexes. Instead webmasters have been led to the international US submission system.

AltaVista has confirmed the findings of Voelspriet.nl. "We will stop with the local databases because they are too time consuming. The 22 countries will be offered results from the worldwide database,'' a spokesman said. To Pandia AltaVista says that the company is fully committed to all its European\International sites.

Webmasters who where under the assumption that 'Express Inclusion' would give them a place in the database of their own country, won't get their money back, but are instead included in the worldwide database.

It seems to Pandia that the main problem here must be that buyers of AltaVista's local paid inclusion service have been under the impression that they would be included in a special national version of the AV database, expecting higher rankings in local searches. Regional webmasters now feel betrayed because they cannot find their paid inclusions in the local results.

Yet, there are good reasons for this, and the situation is only temporary. AltaVista has never promised European webmaster anything but an inclusion in the international database. As soon as AltaVista switches all local sites over to the international version of the search engine, these paid results will show up in the results. AltaVista apparently failed to tell their European customers about this transition period. This is therefore more a case of "PR information failure", rather than a "search engine scandal".

This is what the Express Inclusion service says about local versions and paid inclusion:

"Express [paid] Inclusion submissions are added to AltaVista's global web index. AltaVista has not yet released a program providing rapid inclusion and frequent refresh for specific regional/country searches. AltaVista International sites provide radio buttons which allow end users to search either regional or worldwide content. URLs submitted through this program are accessible when the worldwide option is chosen, in addition to all queries on www.altavista.com. infoSpider [the company selling paid inclusion] is not currently associated with any AltaVista program that provides inclusion for regional content to AltaVista regional international sites."

National versions of AltaVista will probably continue to give national searcher the opportunity to search through a local subset of the database, for instance by restricting the search to .uk websites. If you go to the British version today, you will find that the option "Find results: UK" is pre selected.

Even if all results, local as well as "international", are fetched from the same database, local sites will not have to compete with non-local sites in the local (national) subset of the international database. However, if the searchers decides to search the entire international database, the local sites will of course not get any favorable treatment.

At the moment, however, AltaVista continues to use the "old" local databases in default searches. As most of the searchers that use the local versions are not likely to select a "worldwide search" when using the search service, new local sites will not show up in the search results, even if the webmaster has paid for the inclusion using the AltaVista Express Inclusion program.

We have suggested that AltaVista as soon as possible starts using the international database only on all versions of its search site in order to avoid further accusations.

This is exactly what they are going to do. "In April we started the process of merging the one physical index that holds all the 22 regional subindexes with the international index. You have to stop adding URLs if you are doing a merge," says Ian Hegerty, technical architect for AltaVista to PCWorld. The new index will be ready in a months time.

In our opinion combining the databases could just as well benefit the regional searchers. After all, noone is complaining about the fact that Google or Fast have no national versions of their indexes.

Zoekschandaal AltaVista (Voelspriet)
AltaVista May Leave Users Searching (PCWorld)

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