Frequently Asked Questions

If you have a question that is not answered below, please contact us: z.

How do I get my Web Service listed in the search engine?

We are running an automated crawler that searches the Web for valid WSDL files. It is more than likely that your service will be included automatically. Alternatively you can add your service using our add URL form.

Why is seekda accessing information from my "secret" Web server?

It's almost impossible to keep a Web server secret by not publishing any links to it. As soon as someone follows a link from your "secret" server to another Web server, your "secret" URL may appear in the referrer tag and can be stored and published by the other web server in its referrer log. So, if there's a link to your "secret" Web server or page on the Web anywhere, it's likely that we or other Web crawlers will find it.

How do I exclude my Web Service?

robots.txt is a standard document that can tell crawlers not to download some or all information from your Web server. The format of the robots.txt file is specified in the robot exclusion standard. Our crawler is named Tarantulas and does obey the robots.txt file. However, please remember that changes to your server's robots.txt file won't be immediately reflected in our index, but only after the next crawling run.

Why does seekda perform SOAP calls to my Web Services?

As one feature of our search engine we monitor the availability of services. For SOAP endpoints we do this by checking if the endpoint implements correctly the mustUnderstand specification. If you do not want us sending messages please use the robots.txt file in order to exclude your endpoint URL. Our robot that checks liveliness is named brio; changes to your servers robots.txt file will be immediatly reflected.

Why seekda presents only first 210 results for each query? If seekda claims it monitors so many public Web Services, should not seekda present all of them.

Most surveys on usage patterns of search engines state that the majority of users only look at the first page of search results, and only an insignificant number of searchers go farther than the third page of search results. We believe it is more efficient to narrow down a search by using an additional keyword or one of seekda advanced search fields, then to paginate through so many results. If you try other search engines, you will notice a similar behaviour.

What is the value of having simple Web Services indexed by seekda ("hello world" like Web Services, test Web Services of MS Sharepoint, etc.). They have no value to the end users at all? Should not these Web Services be manually removed from the index?

We disregard already many descriptions we find. For example a description that does not include an endpoint that resolves to a public Internet address is not added to the index. We are working continuously working on improving our algorithms that automatically assess the quality of a Web Services, however ultimately it depends on the individual user which information he deems useful and which not.

Can it happen that the same Web Service is assigned to a couple of different providers?

seekda identifies a provider based on the effective top level domain of the server that hosts a service. This means if a service is hosted on "soap.amazon.co.uk" we identify "amazon.co.uk" as a provider. If a company hosts the same service in different countries like it is the case for amazon(s) "AWSECommerceService" we keep each individual service description in our index.

Can it happen that one provider is having the same Web Services listed several times?

We have found about three times more well formed service description then we index. We remove duplicates based on the rule that we allow per endpoint address and service type (port type) only one description.

How seekda matched providers with the country of their origin?

The country is determined based on the physical location of the servers of a provider.