300m - 5:27 pm on Apr 5, 2007 (gmt 0)

"This has been going on for the last five weeks"

Yes, not so much for supplemental results, but ranking changes are occurring for me. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I am of the belief that some, not all, but some rankings are being skewed to personalization. (i.e click thru data).

I have seen an inconsistency with regards to 2 word and 3 word phrases.

Ex. Green Widgets will rank #1, but Green Widget tool is not ranking as it used too and green widget tool is the intended phrase. I speculate that segmentation or something like that is the cause, but that is only a guess.

I am also seeing a constant change in the total results listed for any given keyword. I can only conclude this is due to increased data refreshes across multiple data centers. Anyone else see an increase like this?

I have noticed that there has been recent PR flux. A great example for me is a Wikipedia page that I created; it continually bounces between a PR1 and PR5. It has been doing this since the beginning of March.

If I was to guess what is going on from a fundamental standpoint; Personalization is starting to show its face in rankings, which is causing link data and rankings to become more sporadic.

However, I can say that I do have 3 or 4 different sets of collected data over the years and I am seeing similar ranking issues that were present this time last year. Not all of the same symptoms, but it does have some similarities.