So I was perusing over some stats for iBegin Source, and saw that the last person who had downloaded our data had come via ‘local business data‘

Looking in the results, I noticed a post on Webmaster World titled “Good Source For Local Business Data?

Lo and behold, it redirected to this page, which had been posted roughly 24 hours ago. And lo and behold, someone had mentioned iBegin.

This was both amazing and frightening. Amazing that not only had Google indexed it so fast, but there were now other people mentioning iBegin. But frightening too - there was no easy way for me to know iBegin had been mentioned. This was especially crucial as tennis_fan28 was slightly incorrect - it wasn’t 50k for the full US, but 40k (not that big of a deal, but accidental mis-information). It wasn’t picked up on blogs. There was no link for me to find it on referrals. BoardTracker (imo the best bulletin board search engine) missed it by a mile. The only thing that would have caught it would have been Google’s advanced search option (where you can specify the date-range of when something was first found). Unfortunately this has two problems: 1) it finds a lot of junk/redundant stuff (eg anything on the ibegin.com domain new to Google) and 2) it only works for *new* pages - a forum thread started a while ago but with a new mention of iBegin would pass through.

Anyway - what eventually happened was I posted in two separate threads where iBegin was mentioned, and the next day the threads were gone. Turned out they had been flagged for review - and I don’t blame them, it did seem very convenient. The posts were restored the next day - anyone try to crawl Superpages.com? and Good Source For Local Business Data?