I was a little bored earlier today so I went to a few search engines and typed in “tyler reed” and clicked search. I didn’t bother with Google because I know they take a while to index sites and display it in search results. (I mean the site was just launched yesterday). Any way the site that surprised me the most was 24.com. In just over 24 hours I am indexed and the first result. This is really something quite special. It raises two questions for me though.
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Why was I indexed so fast?
Google, Yahoo and Live are all aware of this site but due to the fact that the site is only just over 24 hours old they would never display my site in the search results until the site gained some age and maybe even a little link popularity. I’m guessing maybe after a week or two I will be indexed deep somewhere in their search results. 24.com on the other hand has thrown me in the number 1 position for the keyword “tyler reed“. How are they able to validate that this sites content is valid and not just spam? This leads me to my second question.
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How accurate are results from 24.com?
A simple search for Mike Stopforth reveals that they are not very accurate at all. But wait, let us think again, carefully. Mike Stopforth‘s domain ends with .com and we’re searching sites in South Africa only. Now this is something that really gets to me, local search engines can’t distinguish between local content and content from the rest of the world. Even Google’s search from pages in South Africa suffers from this. Mike’s website is clearly full of local content. So it’s clear .co.za domains get preference over any other domain and perhaps others are even ignored, which makes sense, how ever it affects the accuracy of search results. It also affects your online branding. Sure most people in South Africa use Google for searching, but people use 24.com and MWeb search as well.
I also searched for “tyler reed” on Grabble. It returned nothing relevant so perhaps Justin Hartman the creator of Grabble can shed some light on how Grabble crawls and indexes sites.
Something else I would like to mention is that MWeb’s search is really starting to come up. They have had a make over and are returning some really accurate results. kiefpiet another blog I run has started receiving a lot of traffic from MWeb’s search.
Update: It seems Google is also pretty quick, less than 48 hours and I come in 5th, “tyler reed“. Yahoo and Live still don’t seem to have me indexed. On the local side, Grabble and Aardvark rank me in at No. 1, Jonga and Ananzi are still fast asleep.
Another Update: Yahoo now indexes me at No. 4. Google now hits me up to position No. 2.
Here are some screen shots of the search results.
