Something's amiss at AltaVista...

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

From: Jeff Barr (jeff@vertexdev.com)
Date: Sun Nov 26 2000 - 23:03:22 PST

Hello FoRK,

I'd like to gather some data on a very odd issue that I
noticed in my server log. I like to keep the log scrolling
past to see who is visiting my site (ok, I am weird). I
noticed this odd pattern a few days ago.

In a nutshell, the AltaVista spider (tv*.sv.av.com) is requesting
non-existent documents from my site. These are definitely
not documents that existed at some point in the past. I am getting
a request every two minutes or so for such a document. Mixed in
with this are some valid requests. This is on a server that I
own. There is some virtual hosting going on, but only within my
site.

It seems as if they are requesting documents from my site
that are valid on other sites. I say sites because the variety
of file names that it is looking for are too diverse for me
to believe that they are all from the same site.

Here are some:

  /topics/top_stories/massive_tire_recall
  /proxyserver-firesock.html
  /stateofthestep-index.shtml
  /Money
  /cgi-bin/communication.html
  /Society/People/

Has anyone else seen anything like this?

I'm not trying to imply that AltaVista is doing something
sinister, but there is some kind of bug in their spidering
code.

Jeff;

Jeff Barr - Vertex Development - (mailto:jeff@vertexdev.com)
  Address: 4610 191st Place NE. Redmond, WA 98074;
  Phone: Office: 425-868-4919 - Home: 425-836-5624
  Homepage: http://www.vertexdev.com/~jeff
  Weblog: http://jeffbarr.editthispage.com/
  Resume: http://www.vertexdev.com/~jeff/real_jb_resume.html

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Nov 26 2000 - 23:06:56 PST