I am currently working on a new version of MTLookup, offering lots of new features. In a previous article, I wrote that it will probably be released in August. That schedule is still valid.

One improvement will be an extended database. More websites will be indexed, more articles will be included. For this, I recently described how to get indexed by MTLookup.

There are two ways for making your articles be included in MTLookup.

Two choices

The component, which is resposible for collecting articles, is the MTLookupBot. It reads your website and saves the needed data in the database.

The work, which is done by the MTLookupBot, is very similar to many other well-known bots - such as those from Google, MSN , or Yahoo. However, the MTLookupBot does not spider the entire internet on its own. I manually point it to some website and make it do its job.

Currently, there are two modes of operation...

• If I find an interesting website, I will give the top URL to the MTLookupBot. It will then read all pages, locate the Movable Type related pages, categorize them, and find a reasonable excerpt.
• The author might help with that job by creating an XML-file describing the pages, that are to be inserted into the database.

The MTLookupBot has improved during the last weeks. Although locating the interesting pages and extracting a good excerpt is not always easy, it does work, and the results are pretty good.

You can read more about this subject in How to get indexed on the MTLookup website. There, you will also find the description for the XML-file's structure.

mgs | 08/04/2005

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