On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Mike Duvos wrote:
Eventually, the Eternity Server will also serve web content from a variety of more permanent repositories, like Altavista and Dejanews.
How many other major repositories are there? I still have faith in Dejanews, but have serious doubts concerning the permanence and expanse of the Alta Vista database. Their Web index, at least, has not grown at the same pace as Web documents, and seeminly arbitrary sites trigger their "spam filter," where further URLs from that domain are refused.
"John Pike, webmaster of the Federation of American Scientists web site responded to the article, complaining that he found only 600 of 6,000 pages from his web site to be indexed by the Alta Vista. "Pike's response went on to detail the a message he received from Alta Vista regarding this. He was advised that 600 pages were probably the most he'd see for any domain. He was also given the example of Geocities, which is a popular site that provides web space for its members. He was told that although Geocities has over 300,000 members (and thus at least 300,000 potential web pages), only 300 pages from the domain had been indexed."