Ben Trott, is clever and reasonable – and his piece on ping servers is a welcome antidote to idiots like me banging on about ping servers.
I also think that for the larger publishers/providers, making an easily accessible update stream, as Sixapart are doing, is the right way forward. But this doesn't work for the multitude of individual sites.
Secondly, Ben says:
"Google and other search engines seem to do pretty well in keeping their indexes current, even though they don't receive any pings. And they're indexing billions of web sites, while there are only tens of millions of weblogs."
Google don't allow search by date, except for news. With news search, they don't spider and index in the same way they do for ordinary websites, they harvest thousands of sites, not millions and they have to scrape headlines.
Why should news or weblog search be architecturally different from ordinary web search?
Reliable ping servers and decent specs would mean they wouldn't have to be, and we would be able to search the whole web for the most recent information.
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tags: [rssping]