tedster - 6:28 pm on Oct 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

This was mentioned a few weeks ago as well, but inside another thread - not as the main topic. Still,since that post I ahve been pondering what this change might be about.

Yes, I see this kind of change, too. However the search for "SEO" is returning in the 900's for me right now. Still, it's not showing all 1,000. I'm glad you posted about this, because my sense is that this is a visible sign of a significant change on Google's back end, and not just an attempt to limit our access to their data.

Two questions I wonder about:

1. What criteria are used to choose the size limit for that initial result set?

2. Is this tied to some of the "re-ranking" we see, such as in the "-950 penalty"?

For #1, I'm considering that the preliminary result set that a query generates gets truncated at some spot determined by the "relevance scores" of the urls returned initially. Once those scores get too low, then Google won't include the url, even if it does, striclty speaking, contain the search terms.

For #2, (my thinking here is based on a number of patents) it's possible that Google is using more types of re-ranking over the preliminary result set. By truncating the size of the set, they've lowered computational overhead.