I was just checking how we're going with the search engines.

MSN is looking good. No 1 under the forum sa, no 3 under business forums south africa. So far so good.

Google - nowhere. Not a sign of a google crawler here and a few other sites I administer that normally get crawled regularly.

Now I read about a month ago that google was having challenges, mainly caused by dummy sites. Apparently there are scripts that can churn out these sites (specially designed to increase google rankings of the target site) about every 30 seconds.

The report reckoned that about a third of google's servers were full of these dummy sites - a situation that had escalated drastically over the last six months.

When I last popped through a webmasters forum, there was much howling and gnashing of teeth over the whole issue - but I reckon a few of those heavy weights only had themselves to blame.

Still, under current circumstances, it seems if you want the freshest content, you're going to have to use MSN - at least for now. I'm sure google will get over their challenges. Just surprised it's taken this long already.