Become Crawler Info For Webmasters

[Tami]

This spider has been on our sites alot, so here is some information about who it\'s indexing for:

[b]Online Directories Need More Consumer Input[/b]

A story by MediaPost points out the need for online directories to incorporate ratings, reviews and social networking elements to draw consumers (traffic) to their sites. The Kelsey Group provided the report which won\'t be available for a few weeks. Greg Sterling forwarded me an excerpt of the report and will provide the full report next week. I\'ll read through it and post my thoughts in a couple weeks.

I agree with that philosophy and that\'s what I did for my wife a few years ago when I created gogoMama. It\'s a maternity directory that she adds sites to and then rates the sites. Consumers can also provide feedback on products or merchants if they want to. Shannon\'s decided to redo the site so it will be interesting to see what she comes up with. The reason I pointed out her site is because this report from The Kelsey Group isn\'t anything new. The need for objective/unbiased reviews and information from consumers is something that\'s been around for a while.

Just ask Michael Yang, the founder of MySimon (which was acquired by CNet). MySimon was one of the first and most well known product review and comparison engines out there. Now Michael and YeoGirl (incredible search engine technical expert) are at it again. The shopping comparison search engine they\'re getting ready to launch started out with the name Exava but is now called Become. I\'m really looking forward to seeing which features they\'ll implement in the first round of Become.

It\'s folks like Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun that will lead us into the next phase of search technologies. Keeping an eye on them is a good idea because you\'ll probably learn a thing or two and see the future of search evolve before your eyes.

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[b]Become Shopping Search PreLaunch
by Jason Dowdell[/b]

When I talked about Michael Yang\'s new search engine I didn\'t give much detail as to what it would do, how it was put together, what made it unique and so forth.

Well here\'s a sneak peek under the hood brought to you exclusively by Marketing Shift featuring a question and answer session between me and Michael about Become.

1. What is the scope of the Become crawler? Is it limited to retail web sites, wholesalers, CNet, eBay, etc...?

Michael: Our crawler crawls the entire web but only indexes sites and pages that our intelligent crawler deem shopping related. We have proprietary technologies built in to recognize whether a page is a merchant order page, review page, manufacturers, forums, etc.

2. What is the foundation of your ranking algorithm? Google has PageRank and it\'s based heavily on backlinks but it\'s been faulted for the shortcomings of such an algo. Is there a secret sauce for Become\'s algo?

Michael: Yes, we have a new ranking agorithm with proprietary technologies that we believe is the next generation. We overcome many of the short comings of pagerank algorithm.

3. How many unique pages will be included in Become\'s index when it goes live?

Michael: 2.2 billion pages.

4. Is there any way to guarantee Become crawls a particular web site?

Michael: Yes. [more information on getting included in Become\'s search results to follow in a later Q & A session with Michael.]

5. I assume there will be a ppc element to the site since you mentioned that when we first spoke in March at SES. Is this the case and if so, where can site owners, marketing firms, ad agencies, etc... go to get more information on that or to set up an account? Is therea way to set up a ppc account prior to the go live date?

Michael: We are partnering with Google Adsense for our PPC program. [More information regarding the partnership with Google to follow in a later Q & A session with Michael.]

It will be interesting to see how things go with Become as it nears launch. There is an invite-only prelaunch party scheduled for February 10th in Palo Alto. I\'ll be blogging the event and the days leading up to it as well so stay tuned.

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[b] Become Crawler Info For Webmasters
By Jason Dowdell[/b]

A few days ago I told you about the new Become shopping search engine and gave you a glimpse at what you can expect from it.

Michael wanted me to clarify one point from that post. I said that there is a way to guarantee your site is crawled by the Become crawler/spider. But it needs a bit of clarification.

Currently, Become has no plans to offer a \'submit your site here\' form and the only way to guarantee your site is listed in the Become index is to be linked to from another site the BecomeBot has already crawled.

Since they\'ll be launching the engine with approximately 2.5 billion pages in their index, that should make it pretty easy to ensure your site is crawled by the BecomeBot.

It\'s also important to note that the mere fact the BecomeBot has spidered your site doesn\'t mean you\'ll be listed in their index. Once their crawler fetches your site the indexer determines whether or not your site is shopping related, if it\'s not then it will not make it into the search results.

More information can be found at their webmasters [url=\"http://www.become.com/webmasters.html\"]page[/url].

I hope that clarifies things a bit. Let me know if and of you have any questions.