Issues with free-of-charge externally hosted indexes
Free-of-charge externally hosted indexes have been the big growth area since 1999. They started as a solution for small sites with little expertise but have grown (particularly with the introduction of Google University search) into a workhorse solution for many larger sites. The major attractions are no cost and no manpower implications, and with Google, also, the brand name and experience users already have with it. The drawbacks are as follows:
- You have little to no control: The index is hosted externally, often in the US. If network connections are compromised it will not work.
- You will not have any say over which web servers within your domain are indexed
- You will not have any say over how often the index is updated. Google University search updates in weekly blocks but only once per month.
- Documents that are only visible internally will not be indexed
All these free-of-charge externally hosted indexers are spiders that may be controlled from your web server robots.txt file, should you want to restrict parts of the content from being indexed.
