steveb - 12:23 pm on Apr 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

Beyond what? Matt has said they update algorith updates, data refreshes, index updates happen all the time, and most often nobody really notices. What they would define as "major" algo updates are less frequent, but as always, sometimes when Google does minor things it has larger effects than envisioned. It seems fairly clear this is one time. It's obviously a significant update, even if the refresh/update/whatever may not have been intended this way.

"In the summer of 2003... Google switched to an index that was incrementally updated every day (or faster)."