Watch Out For Bandwidth Hog SE

[RawAlex]

If you have never seen it, have a look at searchme.com - search for "news". It's dog slow because this site actually loads all the pages realtime and displays them as images you can click on. The interface is, well, whatever - but it is a massive bandwidth hog.

http://www.searchme.com/#/&q=carol%20cox

That actually pulls the pages off carol's site realtime to make up the search pages. The user never even has to go there to be using up bandwidth. Get a popular search term, and you could end up wasting a ton of money of connectivity to keep these people happy - not to mention server resources.

You can spot them as 208.111.154.16 and 208.111.154.15

[griffin8r]

So everyone block requests from those IPs, then?

[softball]

I do really well on that se. I loved using it. I can't see blocking it at the moment unless it produces useless traffic. Remember the Hun.

[softball]

I have been playing with this toy a little today. As a surfer its great. It navigates me around a lot of blind links in tgps, because I can kind of sort of good enough find exactly what I am looking for without having to bother with the main tgp page. If I want to see hot boob girls in red underwear, I can spot the page easily without going through the rigamorle of redirects that might have big boob girls in black underwear...which is a piss off. So the question is, if this catches on will it affect tgp's and how they work? How about entry pages to sites as well?

[RawAlex]

I need to add this, because I don't think I made myself clear the first time out.

Every time you do a search, the search engine goes out and re-loads all of those pages and turns them into the pretty images you see. They don't load from their cache, the actually connect to your server and pull the page again, for each and every search. Those pages are not really viewable, the ads are not clickable, and if the user clicks to see the page, the page will be reloaded again.

So if you are popular on a search like "porn", you could end up serving thousands of phantom pages per day, with no actual users. So where you may see stats that show plenty of traffic from this site, the reality is that the traffic may be nothing more than their bot pulling your page again to show it to a single user.

[softball]

I need to add this, because I don't think I made myself clear the first time out.

Every time you do a search, the search engine goes out and re-loads all of those pages and turns them into the pretty images you see. They don't load from their cache, the actually connect to your server and pull the page again, for each and every search. Those pages are not really viewable, the ads are not clickable, and if the user clicks to see the page, the page will be reloaded again.

So if you are popular on a search like "porn", you could end up serving thousands of phantom pages per day, with no actual users. So where you may see stats that show plenty of traffic from this site, the reality is that the traffic may be nothing more than their bot pulling your page again to show it to a single user.
I get that, and only click through when the page is loaded. However, I do believe they claim this is their beta version and that will be corrected. From a surfers point of view, it is great and saves a ton of time skipping over useless pages that have no interest. And its very, very fast. I don't think this is the kind of thing I would like to block unless it became a problem. Its the first se that I have seen that is actually exciting to use. Unlike that three d piece of shit that hopefully failed. If this one isn't it, another will come along. Google is getting boring in its current form.

[gonzo]

This engine will only be a problem if it stays the way it is and gains popularity.

Graham is right though... its enticing to a surfer with properly formed pages.

[softball]

I just typed in Anal as a search term...tried a few others as well, and totally managed to by pass tgp pages and get straight to the content in seconds...faster than most tgp pages even load. That should ring alarm bells. Or perhaps it should make tgp owners address the way they move traffic. This could kill blind links overnight if it catches on.

[softball]

Wow, lots of search engine stuff....Microsoft Bing being launched today....100 Million bucks in advertising. Something is in the air....
I'm sick to death of Google, hopefully this will break this awful monopoly.