[ic] how to turn off session id use only cookies

Philip S. Hempel interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Thu Sep 5 02:36:04 2002


> 
> IC 4.9 does address this issue with an mv_tmp_session that never 
> writes the session to disk and never issues an ID or mv_pc. I will
> look at enhancing that as we go along....
> 

I really am confused by the state of many search engines. In
this day and age even the most complex search engines can not
handle some of the simple cgi rfc's. You would think
that people writing engines for places like Google or
lycos they would understand that the "?" is a stop
character for passing args.

It looks like to me that Google takes the worst step of
them all if it sees any long url with a "?" it just stops
it's crawl completly, or at least does try to go very
far into the sight.
I made a few changes and created some smaller urls and
Google picked up two of them.

Since last year we have had 400 hits from google and only
1 page has ever been crawled until two days ago.

For engines that use meta crawls they just seem to stupid enough
and just keep beating the site up until the number of pages have
been reached for time out.

I don't know but in the big world of search engines why have
they not supported cookies in the first, place since IC can't
be the only engine that has this issue.

I started to do a local index of my pages with a search engine
an had to stop since I one night's run created about 4 gigs of
data since it looked like to me the engine sees each page as a new page.

Now I have some crappy php site that gets crawled for hours by Google 
and I know that it also uses args to pass but nothing like sessions on
each page.

====
If the robots exclusions rfc could be expanded to support handing a
cookie to search engines to be used as they traverse a site this would
greatly help out many sites on the net. But that is something of a
dream. Or IC could have a built in list that could be updated for known
search engines or domains (since useing "user-agent" will not always
work) and produce an ID for each or just completly drop sessions all
together (not so much of a dream).
====

I don't know if this will help any but this has been my two cents on 
this whole thing.

My business is driven mostly by search engines. We used
to have a brick an mortar store until two years ago (fire completly
destroyed the business). Since then we have had to depend on the web
for our income (I know bad idea). I have been using IC for around three
years and It has worked out very well. Until recently I never gave
thought to this whole thing of why I keep hearing "My God your store is
great, it just took me hours to find it!".


Thanks for letting me spout.

-- 
	-------------------------
	    Philip S. Hempel