Google - This past month showed us the mother-of-all-changes at Google in many ways. If you didn't get knocked out or lose position on your important keywords, count your blessings because a great many commercial web sites did! ...and incurred serious loss of traffic in the process.
Some time toward the end of October a problem developed between GoDaddy and Google's spider. For some reason it appears a change at GoDaddy blocked the Googlebot spider – resulting in sites being hosted by GoDaddy to be dropped from the Google index. Many people moved their sites to another hosting company and were reindexed within days.
Overture - NBC introduced a new search engine for their NBC.com and BravoTV.com sites which contains Overture listings at the top of the page.
Overture caves in and rejects pharmacy ads - Due to lobbying from the pharmacy industry trade groups and major clients, Overture has shut down advertisements related to online pharmacies and quit selling ads for those keywords.
Inktomi - No changes this month.
AltaVista - Now recent changes for AltaVista.
Fast / Lycos - Lycos has dumped Overture due to a contract dispute and replaced the content with ads from competitor Google. They've also accused Overture of breaching the services agreement made between them.
MSN - MSN has launched an automated news service starting with the UK, France, Spain and Italy. The new service is called MSN NewsBot.
ODP - there has been some house cleaning. We are pleased to announced that a number of our new sites submitted as far back as six months ago are now in the directory.
LookSmart - Adds Article Search
Yahoo - Many are breathlessly anticipating that December might just be the month that Yahoo finally switches over to Inktomi. Others, of course, don't want to see it happen. Yahoo has been testing on and off but, as of the end of November they have yet to switch to Inktomi for their search results.
