Become.com goes into Beta

You can now try out the new shopping search engine at Become.com http://www.become.com/beta/ that recently went into beta. I tried it out and it is pretty nice actually. It will be competition for Froogle for sure.

Don't know about you guys but I have had their Bot crawling my sites on numerous occasions.

 

ahhhh..been seeing the become domain in my logs for the last several days, now I understand what it is. Excellent...hope it's free like Froogle.

 

I forsee an intense battle between Froogle and Become. There is a lot of money to be made.

John Glick has left Yahoo to join the Become team and Chris Kermoian, formerly of Alta Vista is the Vice President of Product Management. They're serious.

 

I started noticing the BecomeBot/1.23 show up in my logs on Jan 02. I immediately followed the url given in the user-agent string and had a look around. The President and CEO is Michael Yang, founder of MySimon.

I signed up for the Beta... they're running AdSense, heh heh.

 

Do they only plan to build SE for shopping? I recently added e-commerce in my sites, but I did see their bot activity before that, so I'm wondering.

 

It's beginning to create a bit of a "buzz" around other forums aswell from intense server logs....

 

How do we "invite" the Become spider onto our sites?

 

I don't think you need to do anything besides getting IBL. The way to get indexed in any SE is to get IBL.

 

Yep just get backlinks, that will do it. I've looked through their documentation and it seems there is no Submit URL form at present.

 

Yeah, I've been seeing their bot since Oct/Nov. Their UI looks so similar to Google's, that they are either trying to copy a good design model or they are actually Google in disguise, so that if you don't like Google, you can go to the 'competition'

 

awstats doesn't know about BecomeBot so it's hits get thrown into the normal visitor stats. I saw it first a few months ago and I thought someone was slurping my sites.

I went to their beta site, signed up, got the research form, did my query, and got kicked back to the login page. Oh well..

 

I added the BecomeBot to my awstats configuration. It is pretty easy. Just open up AwStats\wwwroot\cgi-bin\lib\robots.pm in a text editor and add 'BecomeBot' under
@RobotsSearchIDOrder_list2 and %RobotsHashIDLib

Ross

 

Thanks Ross. I thought it was fairly simple to add a definition but it was such a low priority, I never took the time to figure it out.

 

It is about time they went live with the beta...I was considering blocking them in the robots.txt with all the spidering that has been going on.

 

That thought crossed my mind too. Then I figured, what the heck, it's not a lot of bandwidth..

 

My log file today is 2Mb bigger because of become.com -- is their crawler stupid?

I signed up for the beta but am not impressed yet...if anything, it'd make a good addition for someone like AskJeeves, but I don't see it lasting as a stand-alone shopping engine.

 

I can't find that file when I ftp to my server, but I can see it if I type the path into the browser. Any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong?

 

If you are using shared hosting your ftp account has a "home" directory which is your little section of the hard drive. e.g. D:\website\goplanit_com\

AwStats might be shared between all of the websites via a virtual/mapped directory. e.g. D:\AwStats\ So you can't just go in and edit it. I have a dedicated server so I can change whatever I want. You might ask your hosting company to make the changes for you.

Ross

 

cool...awaiting that robot on my site

 

How good it maybe but registering to search isnt a good idea actually, not for beta atleast. Anyone else here does'nt mind it at all?