Search Engine Abuse

LOS ANGELES, California -- July 09, 2001 -- GiggleCam.com is the personal website of Marty and Chris Morrow. If you insert GiggleCam in any search engine you will find hundreds of porn sites (some are incest and child pornography related) and there is nothing I can do about it.", says Chris Morrow. Due to the popularity of GiggleCam.com -- Documentary of an online couple, porn sites target their website or create websites with the GiggleCam name. Unfortunately, there is no stopping this process.

Search Engine Abuse

LOS ANGELES, California -- July 09, 2001 -- GiggleCam.com is the personal website of Marty and Chris Morrow. If you insert GiggleCam in any search engine you will find hundreds of porn sites (some are incest and child pornography related) and there is nothing I can do about it.", says Chris Morrow. Due to the popularity of GiggleCam.com -- Documentary of an online couple, porn sites target their website or create websites with the GiggleCam name. Unfortunately, there is no stopping this process.

MSN, YAHOO, Excite, Lycos have been contacted of this abuse and they refuse to remove the incest and child pornography related sites from being categorized under the GiggleCam name.

One of the owners of the incest and child pornography related sites was contacted (Marco Hof -- Marco@wis.com) and his reply: It doesnt matter what you fill in the search engines...It returns whatever page the Search Engine spider asked for."

According to the search engine guide the average online Internet user (ages 14-26) spent 22.8 minutes daily on search engines in 2000. 71% of online Internet users reached web sites via search engines (9.8% Friends or Colleagues, 8.5% Newspapers and Magazines, 8.4% Web Sites, 8.1% Surfing the Net, 3.6% TV & 3.3% printed Web Guides.).
Search Engines are important for the same reason that you need a card catalogue in a library. There is lots of great and useful information in a library, but it's physically impossible to examine all the books personally. Not even the savviest web-surfer could hyperlink to all the documents in the aptly named World Wide Web. There are millions of pages and billions of words on the Web. And every minute of the day, folks are posting more. The search engines and directories help you sift through all those billions of 1's and 0's to find the specific information you need.", states Chris Morrow
The term "search engine" is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically different ways.
Crawler-Based Search Engines
Crawler-based search engines, such as HotBot, create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web, then people search through what they have found.
If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.
Human-Powered Directories
A human-powered directory, such as Yahoo, depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.
Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.
"Hybrid Search Engines" Or Mixed Results
In the web's early days, it used to be that a search engine either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. Today, it extremely common for both types of results to be presented. Usually, a hybrid search engine will favor one type of listings over another. For example, Yahoo is more likely to present human-powered listings. However, it does also present crawler-based results (as provided by Google), especially for more obscure queries.
The Parts Of A Crawler-Based Search Engine
Crawler-based search engines have three major elements. First is the spider, also called the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.
Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of the search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the catalog, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated new information.
Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been "spidered" but not yet "indexed." Until it is indexed -- added to the index -- it is not available to those searching with the search engine.
Search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant.
Search engines are important, but the personal websites should be protected!", Says Chris Morrow
GiggleCam.com is the personal website of Marty and Chris Morrow. GiggleCam started when the young couple lived in Chicago and wanted to send pictures home to their family in Houston. GiggleCam.com has grown into a documentary of their lives with daily journals and pictures and has helped 1,000s set up their own webcam site. GiggleCam.com since February 28, 1998.

CONTACT INFORMATION
CHRIS MORROW 310-612-2506    chris@gigglecam.com
http://www.gigglecam.com