An update on Vmgo.com Search Engine

I just wanted to let you all know that http://www.vmgo.com/ is doing very well lately. The site is now a PR5 which means it's gaining some popularity out there and people are supporting it.

Alexa.com is now ranking it at 65,353 today so it finally made it into the top 100,000 most visited and has been there for about 2-3 months now. According to my own stats it is getting around 10,000 page views a day which is pretty intense traffic so I had to move the site to it's own dedicated server with the fastest processor I could get and 4 gig of ram and 160 gig hard drive.

The hard drive was 80 gig before and the database took up the whole hard drive which is the main reason I moved the site. I expect to have to get an even bigger hard drive in another year or so.

Most of the traffic it gets is from india and saudi arabia but it does get 8.2% USA traffic which is up from the last update. I'm not sure why it got so popular with foreign countries but they seem to like it? I notice they search for alot of porn type stuff. HAHA! Who'd of thought?

If you never heard of vmgo.com, you can read about how it works here
http://www.vmgo.com/webmasters.shtml
and
http://www.vmgo.com/about.shtml

I built it all myself about 4-5 years ago using bits and pieces of free scripts I found on the internet. It took me about 2 years of messing around with it to work out alot of bugs I had in the scripts and now it is streamlined and running smoothly.

The concept I had for it came from years of studying google and other search engines and how they ranked pages. I started out as a webmaster and then became a search engine optimization specialist and all my websites were ranking top of the results. I made alot of money because of it.

But I like a good challenge so I decided to build my own search engine because at the time there were only a few major search engines out there that had their own database.

So I began studying the search engines and writing down all the problems I had as a webmaster with the way they ranked pages and their slowness at indexing pages in their index. Then I came up with ways to fix those problems in my own search engine.

The first problem I always had was slow indexing and ranking of pages. So, I designed vmgo.com so you can submit a page for the keyword you choose and it would be indexed right away as soon as you hit the submit button. Then I made it so you can vote your page to the top of the results. Problem fixed. Instant indexing and instant #1 ranking. How simple is that right?

That fixed the whole link popularity crap, PR crap, sandbox, domain bans, etc...

Then my next problem was how to fix the spam problem? So, I simply put a "report spam" link next to each listing that instantly removes the link from the results until I check it out. I get an email that lets me know about it with a link to click that unbans the link if it's not spam. If it is spam, I simply do nothing and that link remains in the database so we know that that url cannot be indexed ever again for that keyword. Simple right?

Spam reports are very accurate! People are amazing at spotting it and don't mind reporting it. They hate it! HAHA!

The last problem I seen with google and others was, when you search for something you may have to go through a couple pages of results before you find what you are looking for which is mildly annoying.

So, my fix was, when you find what you are looking for and click the link, it votes for that page in the results and it moves up in the rankings so the next time you search for it, it will be higher and you won't have to go 2-3 pages deep. There are also voting thumbs up and down to vote or demote the links. It's a very simple method of sorting the good from the bad results.

I noticed google doing something similar to this lately allowing people to vote with their new "search wiki" which is cool but it doesn't help everyone. It only helps you. where vmgo's results change for everyone, helping everybody.

Alot of people have told me that eventually people will game the system which is possible but I actually want them to game the system so they can be reported as spam and taken out of the results. Once they are reported as spam, they are banned from submitting that page to that keyword ever again. Problem solved.

I know that it is a never ending ongoing work in progress but it's fun and keeps my mind occupied for a little while each day.

If you want to support vmgo.com, please go to the webmasters page and copy a link to your site somewhere or add a web search box to your site so people can search vmgo.com from your website. I would really appreciate your support.

Scott Mandarich

 

I tried it and I'm impressed. I've been wanting to achieve a similar goal, but haven't been successful. Will you be willing to sell the script if I want to buy it? What scripting language did you use? PHP or ASP?

Right now I only have been able to code a site search engine in PHP that is restricted to crawling only one site. I don't know how to get it to crawl other sites. Any bit of help from you will be much appreciated.

 

Hadn't heard about this until now, it actually looks pretty impressive, ill trial it for a bit and see how it goes. Thanks for the indepth report.

 

The scripts are mostly done in cgi/perl with some php sprinkled here and there. I am not ready to sell the scripts right now. You wouldn't be able to understand them because they are very messy. HAHA! My script does not have a spider that spiders other websites like google has. you first need to submit your pages to it for the keywords you choose.

SammySpam,

Please report back here and let me know what you think. I always want critics because they help me make it better.

Scott

 

The search engine is looking better and better. I love the list of previous searches on the homepage. It is always interesting to see what people have been search for...

 

Yeah, they search for porn, porn, porn, cars, porn........

HAHAHA! It's too funny. People are so sick these days..

 

Thanks for your reply. People who are passionate about what they do don't like to part with it. I understand you! Moreover, I haven't delved into CGI and Perl before, just HTML and PHP.

You said your script doesn't have a spider that crawls other sites. I didn't submit my link to the search engine and yet when I searched for "quality directory", my directory, Mexabet Web Directory, was on the first page of VMGO SERPs. How did it happen without a crawler? However, your search engine is bringing relevant results. I'm not saying this because my site made the first page. It reflects how Google and Yahoo rank my directory in their SERPs for the same keyword.

Good luck and keep working on it.

 

Your directory got into the results because the first time someone searches a keyword or phrase, my script grabs results from another engine and then places them into a database. Then from that database listings can be sorted and ranked according to clicks and votes etc...

I do not have a spider.

There is a simple spider that will grab your meta information from the page you want to submit which then places that information in the form you need to fill out. This is just to make the submission process a little faster for you. It doesn't work for every site though. I haven't figured that bug out yet but I work on it every now and then to see if I can fix it but haven't yet. It'll come to me eventually.

 

Your answer has explained the mystery to me.

 

thx man will check that out

 

i used to run a small search engine and have a last search box and people used to search fro some really messed up things quite interesting to see though

 

This is really nicely made search engine and the results are preety accurate!

 

Good work my friend!

 

Nice idea, but ultimately, there are two major flaws
1. It requires too much effort for webmasters
2. People may not want others to see what they have been searching for, privacy is everything

 

Nice search engine. Good job.

 

Thanks for all the compliments! I've been working on it for a long time. It's hard to compete with the big engines but it's fun trying.

As for the results being pretty accurate, they should keep getting more and more accurate because of the way it works. It's basically people powered without people realizing they are helping. In the long run as more people search, it should organize the results very nicely for every keyword.

CODForum,

You say it requires too much work for webmasters? Let me see if I can convince you it does not.

Ok, first you submit a new site to google. Then you realize your not ranked for any keywords so you spend hours and hours trading links, searching for one way links, comment on blogs, join free links exchange sites, etc... Then you check your stats and find out that you are getting traffic for keywords that don't make you any sales. So you put adsense on those pages so you can make a quick buck here and there because none of your traffic is converting because google has you ranked for a totally unrelated keyword that doesn't convert to sales. So you re-optimize your pages in hopes to make them rank for your target keyword that is so saturated with 10 year old sites that google trusts because they are old. Then you think, I'll buy some social marketing software so I can submit all my pages and get links from authority sites and get good rankings that way. $150.00 later you're sick and tired of submitting all those pages over and over again and you're still not ranking for the keywords you want.

Or you can...

Submit a page on vmgo.com to the keywords or phrases you choose your page to rank for in a minute or less and then vote your links to the top of the results in a few more minutes and you're done. Do that for every page on your websites and you're in business.

So six months with google or 6 minutes with vmgo.com? Which one is more work?

There's only one thing vmgo.com lacks and that is people using it. That is why it is important to promote it from your websites. If something better comes along, you tell people about it. Vmgo.com is better and a well thought out system that will eventually make google results and the others look not as good. Sure it's not perfect but it works well.

As far as privacy for the searches, there is no way to tell who searched for what. You can only see the words that have been searched. Not who searched them. I may take that option off of the home page and create a seperate page that shows them that the home page links to. I will eventually put a smut filter in the script.

Scott

 

Thanks for this, i'll check it out!

 

I am very happy that there are persons like you
really love it

 

Thanks Language Master, I seen that you submitted your site. Looks good!

 

its ok, it brings accurate results, but its full of link vomit at the bottom of the search page...