FAQs about TopicCrunch / TopicCrunch Pro

I can't find the search string in the page that the hyperlink takes me to

This is quite normal. At least one of the search engines has found at least one of the four search terms in its index files appearing on the site. That does not mean that the search term is on the home page of the domain, and it doesn't even mean that it's still on the site – the search engine indexes may be out of date.

I requested 900 hits on 3 search engines and got 3255 domains – why?

If you expected a maximum of 2,700 hits (and far fewer with duplicates removed), then you may not be taking account of the fact that each of up to four search terms is searched for individually, and on each of three search engine separately.

Does TopicCrunch get its results from a specific search engine datacenter?

TopicCrunch doesn't aim at a specific Google, Yahoo! Or MSN data center - it calls on, for example, search.google.com and Google does whatever it does. TopicCrunch does a 'simple search' - in other words, the URL starts with http://search.google.com/ie? Or the equivalent for other engines.

This helps it normalize the results with respect to duplicate sites, and so on.

What about sponsored results and advertisements on the results page. Are they included?

Sponsored results are not included in the count, if you're doing a specific domain search, nor in the list of results returned if you ask for a page of domains.

If you are asking for a web page of results and you are digging deep, however, there's a good chance that a advertisers will be there, because of their organic listing.

Why are there seven sites with a highest rank of 1?

You may only be looking in three search engines, but with four search terms as well, you could conceivably have as many as 12 different domains with a rank of 1, in one search or another. "Conceivably" but this SEO-dream rarely comes true!

Why does TopicCrunch need a "Sleep Time"?

The search engines do not like heavy loads from one computer. If you request search after search, many times over with no pause, the engine may recognize your IP address and ban you from further searches for a period. Making TopicCrunch pause for a few seconds avoids this type of load and therefore this penalty. Treat TopicCrunch as a job in the background, not as a search query in your browser, and the limitations that the search engines impose will not be a problem. This also reduces the load on your PC, so that your other activities are not slowed down too much.

MSN wants to set a cookie – should I accept it?

You should accept cookies for MSN or TopicCrunch may not work properly. You can delete them later if they bother you. TopicCrunch needs to get search results in large lumps to avoid taking too long: 100 results at a time at Google and Yahoo and 50 at a time at MSN (the maximum in each case). MSN stores this option in a cookie. Requesting 50 or 100 results at a time also lessens the chance of being banned from search engines.

(A cookie is a small text file that saves certain information that can be requested by the web server that set it.)

I was banned. What next?

Sometimes, just doing the search again will work, we have found. More likely you will have to wait half an hour and try again.

I asked TopicCrunch to beep on search completion - it didn't

TopicCrunch uses the system speaker, not speakers attached through the sound interface, if any. Your CMOS (computer start-up) settings may have suppressed the system speaker from functioning.

Too many search units

If you see the number of search units for MSN in the Dashboard ticking up too fast, you may need to change your search engine options. "Too fast" means, for example, that you requested 100 hits for four search terms and MSN counts up to 40. In this example it shouldn't go past eight. The number of hits returned by Google and Yahoo can be controlled by TopicCrunch. The number of hits returned by MSN cannot – it depends on the settings that you have requested and saved, and these will be saved in a cookie. Go to http://search.msn.com, click on settings, and under Results, make sure the Show results drop-down says Show [50] results. You must then accept the cookie, close TopicCrunch if it is still open, and start again.