renee - 6:01 pm on Apr 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

"Supplemental results are results that we can show for some more arcane queries that typically have fewer results."

With all due respect to GG, this sounds like Marketing reply to hide a deficiency. It looks like a separate supplemental index is necessary only if the main index has reached some kind of limit, either an index address limit, a horsepower limit or algorithm problems.

It has also been stated elsewhere by a google person that google has 4 billion documents and 3 billion web pages. sounds like the difference is in the supplemental bucket.

about 25-30% of my pages have been relegated to the supplemental bucket. can others tell me how many of your pages are in the supplemental bucket? Maybe with enough data, we can estimate how big the problem is.