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Google Weirdness
Written by Mike Rundle on June 21, 2006
Last week I was over at Google and decided to do the typical vanity search: either your name, or your site or company, etc. I Google’d 9rules and came up with about 3.2M results which was up from the last time I did it. Yesterday I ran the same query again but it only came up with ~1.6M results…. what?!? I was just talking to Paul a second ago on IM and we ran the query again so I could show him the weirdness, and now it’s back up to around 3 million.
I realize that query results can change and shift, but dropping 40-50% in a matter of a day or two and then popping back up seems pretty odd to me. Do you guys know what could be causing this?
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June 21st, 2006 at 11:53 am
Google is very broken right now — the recent “big daddy” datacenter updgrade caused a lot of flux in the results and also jacked the normal queries used to track mentions of a site or keyword.
June 21st, 2006 at 11:58 am
No idea. I’m going on three months of http://greenr.com not being listed on Google, yet it is cached and crawled almost daily. I have the WordPress Google Sitemap plugin running and the Sitemaps page shows all my pages crawled and page ranked, yet it’s still not indexed.
Same thing happened with a previous WordPress site as well. Yet I setup a tiny little .php page on a new domain and within a week it’s indexed, with no inlinks or action on my part at all.
Go figure. If there’s anyone reading this with connections or pull at Google, it’d be nice if they could let me know what’s going on here, or work some indexing magic if possible.
June 21st, 2006 at 12:06 pm
As far as I understand, every time you hit google (or at least every time you’re in a different location) you’ll get different servers and therefore different results. I just got results for ‘about 1,320,000 English pages’ for your 9rules search.
It’s not got anything to do with the indexing, just how current the server you’re hitting is. Something like that.
June 21st, 2006 at 12:19 pm
What Google reports to the public and what Google is tracking behind the scenes are two different things.
Pagerank is a good example of this, its only usually updated 4 times a year, but between the updates your pagerank could go up or down. Pagerank is not really a great gauge anyway, but that’s beside the point.
Google is also horrendous for reporting an inaccurate number of backlinks too. They like to keep certain things under raps and keep the people guessing, the SEO game is virtually built on guessing and trial & error.
So my point is, you can’t really trust the numbers Google reports, just trust the search results because in the end that’s what really matters.
June 21st, 2006 at 12:22 pm
That is due to google reindexing their databases.
June 21st, 2006 at 12:23 pm
One other point, Google is constantly changing their algorithm and sometimes weird things happen.
Very good chance nobody will never know what’s going on unless they become a google employee.
June 21st, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Yeah, I’d concur with eric. Google have multiple data centres and you’ll randomly be allocated one when you do a search. One of the data centres index may have not been quite up to date.
June 21st, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Nick: I had the same problem with my one of sites. At one point I aquired an invite to google’s site tracking (analytics) and the next day I was in the index. So sign up for Google Analytics if you can.
June 21st, 2006 at 12:52 pm
I think like Eric. Google is a huge cluster of servers/databases used for indexation, depending on many parameters, a request can be routed to a different server every times you hit the search button.
June 21st, 2006 at 12:58 pm
I have to agree with Chris. With numbers that large, just a minor shift in the algorithm or a db server going down, result numbers can change a lot.
June 21st, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Nico: It’s been on Analytics since day one. Just bizarre if you ask me. Maybe the domain’s previous owners got it blacklisted. Who knows?
June 21st, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Re: Google Weirdness
The 9 Rules network posted a question about google results returning a wildly varying number of results. I read yesterday that Google was attempting to get rid of all of the millions of spam blogs in their index, so it makes perfect sense that other se…
June 21st, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Machine elves – that is what’s up with google. If in doubt blame the machine elves.
June 21st, 2006 at 3:42 pm
I think you guys are definitely right about the multiple datacenters, the discrepancy was probably just a synchronization issue.
Thanks for all the help!!
June 21st, 2006 at 4:15 pm
I have seen the Google query jump for the past 2 years. Most recently the big daddy update greatly shifted the results of my site.
I have also noticed that Google is doing some hardcore crackdown on pages that are less important in their index. 40-50% is nothing, I have seen my results fluctuate up in the 90% area.
June 21st, 2006 at 7:56 pm
I know it’s a matter of multiple datacenters. Their caches are not synchonized. you can test it here:
http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php
Think about it: millions of pages updating and changing its content. How can you manage rating and search items?
Google is amazing, but not God!
June 21st, 2006 at 8:03 pm
ups! i forgot to mention: in my case, it was really weird. During 2 weeks, if i’d do a search in Safari’s toolbar, my website was not found. If i’d go to Google’s website and do the same search (just “hombrelogo”), then the first!!!
(i got mad!)
June 22nd, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Different results are purely datacentres serving load balanced and varying cached recordsets. This is pure data grabbing. You’ll probably notice the order of those results stays the same though, which is rank and is managed on the middle tier.
My biggest question is how the hell does Google decide what website sits at number 2,999,999 and which one gets 3,000,000?
June 23rd, 2006 at 4:15 pm
its all statistics at the end of the day, and statistics can be interpereted in many ways…
June 24th, 2006 at 6:01 am
Nick: You need to contact Google directly. There is a good chance that the domain is blacklisted or you have been mistakenly penalized for something else.
June 30th, 2006 at 4:42 am
Trackbacking your entry…
[...]See other threads about the update on DigitalPoint and SEOchat. … whatç—´ your new pagerank?
[...]
July 8th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Results 1 – 10 of about 1,490,000 for 9rules. (0.25 seconds)
Weird, Google do seem to updating alot (a new super massive datacenter or something?!
July 27th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Google has over 600 active IP addresses as shown in a big list over there: http://www.searchengineforums.com/apps/searchengine.forums/action::thread/forum::google/thread::1150837925/