A Good Portal Site with a Normal Search Engine: Excite.Com
Written: Jun 14 '01
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The Bottom Line
The question is if you want to use Yellow Page or White Page for the internet search.
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| Full Review |
As you may know, Excite.Com is a very popular site. Their main focus is to offer the good portal site with a lot of news, shopping mall, useful tools and so on. But in terms of search engines, nothing is special at Excite.Com. In this review, since the category is Excite Search, I am going to focus on their search engines.
PRODUCT FEATURES
From the internet consumer's point of view, Excite search is divided into two sections. One is the simple search. And the other is advanced search. With the simple search mode, you can search web sites, directory, news and photos with keywords. With the advanced mode, you can specify your search in the different ways. Namely, you can specify 4 things. The first part is the importance of the words with "must have," "good to have," and "must not have." The second part is the choice of the result display types. The third is the language preference. And the last one is the domain (or country) preferences.
From the webmaster's point of view, Excite Search is very friendly with those who have the enough budget to advertize their own web sites. In other words, even if you make nice informative web site, you should pay some cost to be indexed at Excite Search. This is great only if the web site owner is a company. But this feature is not ideal for the non-profit sites and the personal sites.
Let me explain the site submission part a little more. If you want Excite Search to check your web site BEFORE they decide if they index your web, you have two options. One is Express Submit, and the other is Basic Submit. Both of the two are supported by LookSmart (http://looksmart.com). The costs are US $199 and $99 for Express Submit and Basic Submit, respectively.
The difference between these two types are the time period in which the editor at LookSmart checks the submitted web site. With Express Submit, they guarantee the site review within 2 business days. With Basic Submit, the editor will check the site in about 8 weeks. If approved for indexation, the site information is stored at the database of LookSmart Network, which includes Excite, AltaVista, MSN, iWon, CNN, Time Warner, and over 370 ISPs. (Even if they decide not to index the submitted site, the cost is not refunded.)
Notice that LookSmart Network covers more than 75% of the internet users in the US. Thus considering the time period difference, Express Submit is extremely nice for the companies that sell very competitive products. However, the price tag of $199 is not very low for normal webmasters who can't make a lot of money through the web. Thus a lot of very useful and informative small web sites are not reachable from Excite Search.
To clarify the pros and cons, let me list them up below.
PROS
1) Excite.Com is very popular portal site. Thus serious web masters will probably use the service by LookSmart, and the serious web sites will be indexed at Excite Search.
2) If you are selling your products in very competitive markets, indexation at Excite Search will reward you a lot. You can minimize the advertizement costs.
3) The system itself at Excite Search is very reliable.
CONS
1) The lack of free submission blocks a lot of useful and informative sites to be indexed at Excite Search.
2) The results you see at Excite Search are likely from large commercial sites.
3) If you want to locate the very small sites' URLs, you are probably out of luck.
OVERALL
Simply put, the Excite Search works as the yellow page but not as the white page. If you want to find some service providers or product sellers, the results at Excite Search are very reliable. However, Excite Search doesn't work as the white page, the usage of this search engines are limited.
It totally depends on the user's preference. If you are internet shopper, Excite Search will work great. But this search engines is not the place for the serious researchers.
A Survivor in Search Engine World: LookSmart.Com
http://nyscramble.epinions.com/content_23749758596
Recommended:
No
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