Excite released a new ranking system on the Fourth of July.

Prior to the Fourth, there really was no rhyme or reason to the results pages. Sometimes results would include summaries, and other times nothing but titles would appear. If you ran a search and then 5 minutes later ran the same search, the results would be vastly different and often were not relevant in the least.

This was attributed to many in the industry to unsynchronized databases.

Excite claims that to have upgraded its link analysis in order to improve relevancy. Where they simply used to count how many links pointed at a site, they now rate the quality of those links, so that a link from Microsoft.com would count more than a link from joeshomepage.com.

I am not happy to say this, but the best bet for getting into Excite is to pay LookSmart.