Miamacs - 2:06 pm on Nov 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

Didn't quite get what this thread is about... ( overall number of results or results displayed? ), so excuse me if I'll be stating the obvious.

No more 600-999, did I miss something?

It's been like this for years on generic, ultra competitive searches.
I don't get it,... did *I* miss something?

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

TrustRank.

OK, that's the method. Criteria are... well... SPAM and aggressive SEO activity. What else. *grin*
Anything that can manipulate relevancy and PageRank but not TrustRank. That's what it's for. See below.

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

The -950 penalty, it has no connections with.

The rest... I don't think so... in what way could it be?
It's partially a manual setting though so...

...returning in the 900's for me right now

This threshold is virtually a runtime setting.
It can change several times a day, or be left alone for weeks.
In an area, generic travel sector, I watch an ultra competitive phrase that'll show any number of results between 97 (!) and 900'something.

...

The number of results displayed is based on the trust threshold set for a given search. The initial - relevancy + trust + whatnot - set is always much larger of course.

This will be first filtered for sites that don't clear the required parameter ( trust ), and only *then* comes the application of some rerankings.

Thus the list will only show results from *domains* and within them, *URLs* that are trusted.
Sometimes compromising some more relevant sites that'd have ended up at good positions otherwise...

And to newbies reading this, guess what, this is what we've been calling the 'sandbox effect'.

Trust increases as links/sites age, thus sometimes sites with no *new* links suddenly clear the threshold. But it's not a time limit.

The final list will show results from only the most trusted domains... Apply the &filter=0 parameter and you did a site: search on them, but only them.

The top list is always clipped at a point that feels convenient, more often than not because after that position, there's some irregular SPAM activity ( or too many people reaching the 'pro-level' in any other 'unfair' way - Google's interpretation of fair, not mine. ) It's effective allright. A little too effective in some cases, but most of the time I'm thankful it's there.

Rerankings like the -950 are applied in a very interesting way. A site that would be #1, but is filtered to be -950 will show up #355 on SERPs that end at position 355. You know, that's because sites that go -950 ( for popular 1,2 word phrases ) are in fact, trusted. As I've been saying for almost a year. But whatever.

...

Or was this all off topic?

[edited by: Miamacs at 2:14 pm (utc) on Nov. 8, 2007]