isitreal - 8:17 pm on Oct 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Why have the band-aids they've applied to their index in the last 18 months been so pathetic? This alone should have been enough to endanger the IPO!

Bandaids were enough when the press and their supporters didn't bother applying the kinds of critical standards they should have. Google has a cute name and company slogan, and for some reason this made everyone roll over and wave their legs in the air rather than just apply the same standards you apply to any other commercial/corporate entity. However, think of the damage it would have done if the press had started printing articles about the algo being maxed, IPO prices would have dropped dramatically, nobody wants a sick company. Then if you can implement some algo tweaks to force out enough pages to force webmasters to buy adwords, boost income, boost pre IPO bottom lines, presto. Then work out the engineering headaches all these hacks create afterwords, now that is.

back to the topic: what and why the sandlag?

We didn't leave the topic, the topic thread is why does it exist, the sandlag [haha] is a phenomena that is relatively easily explained by physical limitations on the algo.

This is not what we'd expect from a thoroughly working search engine, is it?

no, but it is exactly what I would expect from a holding pattern, full on system redo, the example I've given before is when your harddrive is basically full, you start shuffling stuff in and out, waiting to add stuff [this is just an analogy, I'm not saying that google is physically out of storage space, that would be stupid]. Then finally one day you break down are realize not only is it time for a new harddrive, it's time for a new system altogether, since in the meantime everything is faster and has more capacity. This analogy might be more accurate than we realize, remember that google runs on the same boxes you run on, more or less, it doesn't use supercomputers, so what you see happen on your own whitebox is what is happening, more or less, on google's. And what's happening now is a move to 64 bit computing on Linux.