Robert_Charlton - 6:04 am on Jun 12, 2010 (gmt 0)

@gford: That is TOO funny!

Re the music search in the Google announces Caffeine is completed [webmasterworld.com] thread...

I should mention that I had a pretty good idea that WebmasterWorld would end up outranking the pages that were returned, but I decided not to edit Slinger's post that asked about the search. (Notice, though, that I'm not repeating his search terms again). It's pretty instructive, actually, to try the search on all three engines, maybe even read about what I found when I tried doing that.

... I can pretty safely say that in English language serps as indexed by the three major search engines, there aren't enough results to fill the first page.

I compared Google, Bing, and Yahoo, searching a variety of ways, and arguably Google came up with the best results, with Bing arguably the worst. There are only two sites on the entire web... two pages, if you enter the search as suggested... that provided immediately useful results for the query.

Before WebmasterWorld intruded by posting the search, Google ranked those pages as #1 and #2. Now WebmasterWorld is in there too, in between those two... one of the reasons we don't like to post specifics. ;)

Anyway, it's very clear to me as I look at Google results that when matches are sparse, as they are in that search, Google is returning a variety of different match types in different positions, one of which has Blackduck run together, with "winds" an onpage match on that result. Google's results appear to be differentiated by match types when there's not much in the index to satisfy the query.

I find this kind of interesting, as earlier I'd mentioned the following in the History Repeating [webmasterworld.com] thread...

...I'm seeing no overall patterns either for relevance or quality... and again, no consistency throughout a search to suggest reasons for rankings. It's as though in different markets and different spots on a serp, different conditions trigger entirely different algos...

The music search suggests, at least for obscure searches, that this is what's going on. Each position was in essence a different "algo", with results returned in the order of match types that Google, because of the history of matches it keeps, thought might make me happy. Note that I'm not saying that we should be happy about having our queries changed. I am saying that if certain types of pages are getting filtered out at the start, this might describe what we're seeing with the rest.

Back to the music search... for Google to run two words together and return Blackduck as one word (after first returning the two matching pages in the #1 and #2 spots), might make statistical sense... more so, perhaps, than what Bing returned as #1, which was: "D2: The Mighty Ducks" as #1, with no "winds" at all. No winds at all just blows me over. ;)

Anyway, that's why I think we're seeing some of what we're seeing.