Become SEO Service Strategy
The Become search engine was created in 2004 by founder, president and CEO, Michael Yang, who also founded mysimon.com. The Become search engine is headquartered at Mountain View California and is currently still in beta format. Ironically, Become’s office is located almost midway between Google’s campus and Microsoft’s MSN campus.
The Become search engine caters to locating e-commerce related information. It does not index e-commerce merchants and their wares instead, it uses the BecomeBot to crawl the web searching for product related research content for its index inclusion (currently, manual submissions are not accepted). This content includes: buying guides, reviews, articles, specifications, forums, etc. If your web site contains content related to these categories, a good search engine optimization strategy is in order so that Become finds and indexes your web page. A reputable SEO service can help you with this.
With BecomeBot, crawling speeds can be adjusted through the “dynamic politeness policy.” Upon finding a site, the BecomeBot starts its initial page downloads at a slow pace. It will then adjust its speed based on the amount of pages on the site, as well as the bandwidth of the site. However, sites that contain many pages may take a long period to crawl.
Become also allows site owners control over crawl speeds, via the ‘Crawl-Delay’ feature. With this facet, website owners can specify the amount of seconds they wish delayed between crawls. For example:
User-agent: BecomeBot
Crawl-Delay: 60
Disallow: /cgi-bin
This would specify a delay of 60 seconds between visits.
Note: The robot exclusion file can be added to your website. BecomeBot can be configured to avoid crawling your site, by adding the appropriate text to the robots.txt:
User-agent: BecomeBot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Become uses its own proprietary algorithm called AIR, or Affinity Index Ranking, to locate consumer information regarding products. According to Become, AIR will return results to educate customers about products before they purchase. For example, if a customer is searching for DVD players, AIR will return results with information regarding the various models, formats (such as progressive versus non-progressive), reviews, etc, so that the customer can make an educated decision about what to buy. It specifically targets keywords for consumer products, instead of bringing back unrelated information. For instance, if you enter television as a search term, Become will yield information about television sets, and not irrelevant information, such as television stations. Once users find what they are looking for, Become allows them to compare online stores to find the best prices etc.
According to Become, “AIR technology considers a site to be valuable if 1) it receives links from valuable sites within a similar topic of interest and 2) if it provides links to other valuable sites within a similar topic of interest (while minimizing links to off-topic sites). General purpose search engine technologies such as Google’s PageRank estimate the popularity of a given web page by looking only at links into the page and do so without any understanding of context.”
Through its Dynamic Search Term’ technology, Become provides users with a set of suggested terms to use, based on what they are looking for. This is updated as the user begins typing out a search. A My Favorites tool’ also allows users to build their own reference lists of favorite product searches.
Become also provides users with product news information. The engine scans the most popular news product sites across the USA, providing news updates every 10 minutes. Product news includes items such as: price reductions, recalls and new product announcements.
Finally, Becomes utilizes a spell checker algorithm, which makes appropriate suggestions for the spelling of brand names and model numbers.