> If anyone knows the AltaVista Webmaster, please send me his/her e-mail
> address. This is rather urgent as my error log is filling up, and some
> browsers must be getting frustrated when they get an error message rather
> than their hoped-for information.
hi Ian,
This is not an AltaVista-only problem.. All robot-indexed searchengines will
contain outdated urls... I index (at least I try, depends on available
bandwith+cpu power) all my urls within 10 days, but that's less than one 1M
pages....
Your problem (and you're probably not alone in this) can be solved by a nice
error message, pointing the user to your indexpage (or a redirect).
Or set up a local searchenige, which indexes your site only. That way you
can be sure its up to date.
Anyway, requests like yours to a searchengine-maintainer will probably end
up in /dev/null... I cannot imagine they will set their robot to re-index
your site again... I know I wouldn't...
I get these messages daily :
"Hello wiebe, I've changed my homepage, it contains my phonenumber now,
could you re-index it so people can find my ph-number????"
guess again ...
once, ok... but as many as AltaVista must be receiving .. neah ...
Good luck anyway,
Wiebe
wiebe@il.ft.hse.nl