Web search engines slow on the update
(Information World Review)

A researcher has uncovered serious shortcomings in how web search engines update their databases.

None of the search engines in a study by Dirk Lewandowski updated their results on the same day as there was a change in the web pages they were indexing.

“There’s simply no use in indexing a page daily if the search engine is not able to show this as a result on the same day,” said Lewandowski.

A Microsoft spokesperson said: “We are always working to improve the freshness of our index while ensuring we don’t waste webmaster bandwidth by downloading pages that change infrequently.

“We have recently made changes to our freshness strategy, including deploying support for conditional gets.”

Google had no comment to make on the findings.

Yahoo did not respond by the time we went to press.