whats up with google?

freydaddy · #1 () 12-11-2005, 12:50 PM

one minute a search returns 3 million sites the next it returns 20 million, also so sometimes it shows my old pages in the search and sometimes it shows the new ones, anyone have any idea whats going on?

Kyle · #2 () 12-11-2005, 05:56 PM

no but I dropped out of the top 10 for a keyword I was in literally minutes after I first found it

PPP · #3 () 12-11-2005, 06:31 PM

Google has dozens of datacenters that have either slightly or greatly different results on them. When you search on google.com, the results get pulled from one of the dozens of datacenters, not at random, but if you think of it as random that would be an easy way to understand it.

For example right now (these might change at any second)
http://66.102.9.104/search?hl=en&q=poker 44million results
http://64.233.179.104/search?hl=en&q=poker 199million results

Thes second one has all sorts of old pages in it, and doesn't have a lot of new ones.

ozim · #4 () 12-11-2005, 07:39 PM

The DC you mentioned - http://64.233.179.104 - also returns much bigger number of site's indexed pages - just type site:www.yoursite.com

I wonder if it is a result of some algo uptade going on...

mwack · #5 () 12-12-2005, 11:16 AM

Google's doing a huge update called Jagger, been going on since late September. Until it's over, don't worry too terribly much if you suddenly go from 1st to 68th - I did, but I'm back up now. They're just dinking around with stuff.

PPP · #6 () 12-12-2005, 04:21 PM

Jagger has been over for a month. This is a whole 'nother update, which will be on a couple datacenters for a few months while the others have the "regular" stuff, so expect two very different results batches to be around for awhile.

stgeorge · #7 () 12-13-2005, 05:09 PM

I have also seen some really weird stuff happening:

- Different rankings from data centres
- Some even showing different PR
- Results sets vary

From reading the SE forums it appears as if this is not really an update. It does appear to have settled down in the last few days. It does look like Jagger has settled down now.

One theory I have is that google has improved geo targeting, i.e. results sets will vary depending on geography. I can see this for one of my sites. It has some rankings only if you search from the country where it is hosted. Who knows, we can only speculate.