Magestic 12 Search Engine

In the last post, we talked a bit about the Magestic SEO link analysis site. It gets its data from their own search engine known as Magestic-12. This project started in 2004 and uses distributed computing much like the SETI@home project which analysed data from the Arecibo radio telescope looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe. The main advantage to the distributed computing element of the search engine is that it can crawl the web faster and update its index more frequently. Volunteers can download software that turns their machine into a search engine node. Allowing it to crawl, collate and send back it data to the master server which stores and runs the search engine.

While it may not have the computing power of Google, the demands of storage mean that Majestic 12 does not store the content of a web pages, only the URLs. This allows it to have a database of around 52 billion URLs in its index.

Pages are sorted in importance according to the number of links pointing to them. ACRank measures the number of links and goes from 0 – 15. According to the web site, ACRank of 0 and 1 require 1 link. (0 if you have one backlink 1 if you have more than one backlink but from the same domain). Further increases in ACRank require 2^(ACRank-2) so if you had an ACRank  of 5 then this would equate to 2³ links or 8 links. Up to a maximum of 2¹⁵ = 131,072 links. This is a simple ranking system which at present does not take into account the value or weight of the backlinks.

It also has a third-party PHP API to embed the search engine within your own web site. Majestic 12 is still in its infancy but it has a lot of potential, if the resources can be obtained to achieve its lofty ambitions. An off-shoot of the search engine has been a link analysis program which is certainly a useful addition to the SEO tools available as most of the current analysis programs use the Yahoo database.