I decided it was time to check my site's popularity across the 'net. So I fed the search string "pvc regenpak" into the biggest of the available search engines. There are a few nice initiatives apart from the big cannons but I could not remember the urls for them...

The Survey
I not only fed my search string (using quotes to signify a phrase not two words that might be unconnected) but I also carefully checked that the search would encompass the whole web and all languages, not just English. Being a Billy Gatez basher I refrained from using the security hole called "Internet Exploder" euhhh... "Internet Explorer" and opted for the latest version of Mozilla (1.7- final release!) together with my ad-filtering proxy (Privoxy). Thus armed I hit "Enter" and examined the results that appeared on my screen.

The Results
In no particular order:
MSN (technology preview) was a weird duckling. Initiated as a demonstration of Microsoft's superior technology it came up with two hits when I tried it on my Linnuks machine but failed to produce results when I tried it again on my win2k PoS. How different was MSN's official portal! Entering my search string here yielded no less than nine results. My site ranked sixth, and did not point to the home page but to my story on Agu rainwear. Undaunted by this result I turned to my own favorite search engine, Teoma. This newcomer is powered by veteran Ask Jeeves, and usually returns pretty good results. In my case I hit seven results, with my site listed first! Only again it's the Agu page... Moving on to Netscape, the company that made Internet great. Having no search technology by themselves they resort to Google, producing five results. My site again is listed first, and Netscape points to my home page! As AOL also uses Google, it produced equal results. Oddly enough, Google itself produces eight results (out of 41 occurrences), still it lists my site first and points to the home page. As Hotbot is powered by Lycos I'd expected that the results were again the same. And they were! Both Hotbot and Lycos ranked my site seventh, and pointed to my Agu horror story. It also featured some prehistoric links to my site, the first and third hitting a "404" page (not found). Finally I tried Alltheweb, which has now been gobbled up by Yahoo. So I again compared them, and oddly enough, this time the results differed considerably. My former favorite Alltheweb (once renowned for its now defunct FTP searches) failed to find my site, even though there were plenty links within the search results! Yahoo ranked my site second, but (it gets boring) pointed to the Agu page. Oh well...

More findings and Verdict
As there are quite a few sites that link to mine many of these showed up in the search results. And of course several webstores (Coolegem, Hutter) were found. Unfortunately they won't sell to individuals... The Google bunch (Google, Netscape and AOL) found the most, Lycos (Hotbot) also had a good number, as did MSN and Altavista. Alltheweb and the Microsoft technology preview failed miserably. My personal favorite Teoma was OK. Still, I find it odd that even though my home page has "pvc regenpak" in its keywords, the page title and the html title it's not always the first hit, which would be expected with such a small number of total hits!

Update
As this page was put up on 1 July 2004, it would be most entertaining to see which search engines picked the new page up the fastest. After all, the link is included on my home page! It transpired that I was already too late, as both Google and Yahoo had found this page on the fourth of July (using: '"pvc regenpak" survey'). Apparently they're busy crawlers! Also the users of Google's technology (AOL, Netscape) had found my page. For some reason Yahoo only pointed to this page, and not to the home page where the link is. But then again, this is the relevant page! Finally, Microsoft's preview failure seemed to have been a glitch. They now also have found a testserver of my provider XS4ALL but that page has a broken link to my site. Sheesh

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