The New Search Engine on the Block
. . . Aesop
Part 1

by Robin Nobles

Pickings are getting pretty slim in the major search engine
industry. This year, we lost GO, and we'll most likely be losing
NBCi and Excite before the end of the year. Excite closed
Magellan recently. Every time an engine folds, it's painful to
those of us in the industry.

And regretfully, we haven't had a new spider engine to surface in
some time . . . until the Aesop engine.

Aesop (http://www.aesop.com) is a brand new spider search engine
established by the Aesop Marketing Corporation, a well-known
marketing company that promotes products such as 1001 Killer
Internet Marketing Tactics and Swiss Army App for Webmasters.

What makes Aesop rather unique is that a marketing company
developed it, rather than some highly skilled technical gurus who
might need to take Business 101. In other words, Aesop just might
succeed in doing what the majority of the major engines haven't:
make a profit!

Because a marketing company developed Aesop, you'll see some
definite differences in the way they do business. For one, when
you submit to the engine, you're asked if you want to receive a
copy of their online marketing newsletter. The choice is yours.
In other words, they're using the power of permission e-mail
marketing to harvest e-mail addresses for future marketing
mailouts.

Do you blame them? If you set up a search engine or even a
vertical directory, wouldn't you do the same thing? You'd be
wasting valuable resources if you didn't.

What else does Aesop do that's different from some of the major
engines? To begin with, they're keeping their search page simple.
Walking in the footsteps of Google, Aesop does one thing on its
search page: search.

Another unusual aspect of the Aesop engine is that it has its own
META tag (http://www.aesop.com/metatag.htm). Will it help you
with rankings in other engines? It's doubtful, but Mark Joyner,
CEO of the Aesop Marketing Corporation and a top Internet
marketing expert, says that it will definitely boost your rank at
the Aesop engine dramatically.

To learn more about the Aesop engine, I asked Mr. Joyner some
questions.

Question: In what direction are you headed with the engine? A
portal? Pay per clicks? Or, a combination?

Joyner: We have a unique advertising model that we are perfecting
right now. Should be out in a month or so. It won't be like
anything else you've seen yet.


Question: If you're considered PPC's, who are you looking to
partner with?

Joyner: We have considered partnering with existing PPC engines
(I can't say who), but that probably won't be the route we go.


Question: So many of the major engines have tremendous problems
with spamming. So far, what are you experiencing in terms of
spamming? What practices do you consider to be spamming?

Joyner: Of course from day 1, the spammers will get in there and
try to mess up the results of any engine. We are taking an
aggressive approach to preserve the integrity of the engine for
the searcher.

I consider the following to be spamming:

* Deliberately attempting to have your site indexed under an
unrelated term. (Which is really stupid in my book anyway, since
someone searching for "pamela anderson" probably does not want to
hear about a "make money fast scheme.")

* Deliberately attempting to have the same content indexed more
than once by submitting the same content on different HTML pages.
(Once again, stupid anyway, since someone seeing a listing 10
times in an engine will know what the spammer is up to, and will
have lost all credibility.)


Question: Do you foresee any problems in handling WebPosition
Gold queries? Do you have any plans to develop a relationship
with Brent Winters and WebPosition Gold, which would also help
Aesop's visibility?

Joyner: I prefer not to answer that question at this time.


Question: What is the standard submission to index period?

Joyner: Varies, but we're hoping to get it down to 48 to 72
hours.


Question: Will you be using human editors to review submissions
at some point in the future?

Joyner: Absolutely. Of course, indexing will be automatic, but we
already have humans spot checking for spam and quality.

In Part 2, we'll continue with the interview of Mr. Joyner.


This article was written by Robin Nobles, a professional
freelance writer and the Director of Training at the Academy of
Web Specialists (http://www.academywebspecialists.com). Over the
past few years, she has trained thousands of people in her online
and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies and
has written three books that can be ordered through Amazon. Visit
the Academy's training Web site to learn more about their online
courses: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.