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Blog Links on Alta Visa

After a few months the penny dropped and I finally noticed that each of these blogs is being picked up on the Alta Vista Searchengine links page for www.download2mp3.com .

Alta Vista is now owned and managed by Yahoo and it is a long time since it was a major power in the search landscape. But it is still of interest because it publishes the longest list of links from other sites and it is the source of that information for Yahoo.

Following Google's lead, links from other sites have been used as part of the page ranking algorithm by the major search engines for some time and as with Google they have had to find ways to filter out the junk links that would otherwise swamp the algorithm. What is not clear is the way Yahoo filters the Alta Vista list - on some sites it looks like it is simply a matter of time while on others there is a sustained gap - so we will continue to watch this with interest.

Today's streaming sample is a LoFi clip from the Marionette Funeral March that Gounod composed as part of the incidental music for Jean d'Arc and was latter adopted by Alfred Hitchcock as the theme tune for his long running television series. This arrangement on Steel Drums and Mega Moog synthesizer highlights both the playful and menacing aspects of this piece.

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