Large Differences in Result Numbers

[bwelford]

Something very surprising has been happening over the last few days. A search on Google today for "the" shows a count of 1.29 billion web pages. That's surprising because that count yesterday, October 2, was at 6.24 billion. On October 1 and prior to that for quite some time this count had been running at about 5.34 billion. Whether this shows a major change in the way the Google algorithm works or is something peculiar to this particular search is a matter for speculation.

However what is stable is that #1 on this search is the Onion and #2 is the White House. It's been like that for months. At least there is something you can count on in this volatile world.

Barry Welford

[vitaplease]

Yes, the presented number of search results have been varying and not only for a search for "the".

Hopefully the search results will show some change soonest as well.

[onfire]

Yes have to agree.

Today I see for a search keyword-keyword-keyword that in the SERPs it was down by 20000 normally 42000 +.

that's was yesterday and early today.

Just had another look and now its back to the 42000 + without any fresh tags showing, which is what normally gives it the big boost, so things are happening and changes are filtering through after the pause over the weekend.

[ogletree]

The results are going up and down. I had a 2 word phrase taht had 4.2mil yesterday and today it has 3.1. It had 970K just a week ago.

[davester28]

Sorry for the dumb question, but what exactly is a "fresh tag"?

TIA

[pageoneresults]

This is something that has been happening for at least 60 days now.

My personal opinion is that it has something to do with the Google IPO. Someone in marketing said...

"Look at AV, MSN, etc. The number of results they return are more than ours and it makes our index look smaller. Let's go ahead and start showing a larger number in the results returned so it looks like our index is bigger than theirs (which it is anyway)."

I think it is more of a sub-conscious thing when people see a larger number of results returned. Based on my observations, even though the number of returned results is much higher, the ranking of sites has not changed dramatically, at least in the industries I watch.

[ogletree]

Fresh tag is when you see a date on your result. It means that it is fresh. When a page is first inserted it has a fresh tag as well. Fresh tag results seem to do better than results that don't have one. (all things equal) A common SEO technique is to make sure your pages get changed often. Google seems to like fresh content. It also gets the googlbot used to comeing by more often.

[davester28]

This date show right on the SERPS page? I've never seen it,.... I just did some searches and none of the results show a date.?

I see title, description, url, a link to cached, a link to similar, but never a date

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confused

[ogletree]

There do not seem to be very many of them today. Try tomorrow.

[davester28]

thanks

[abuzer1]

Hi,

The changes are interesting..New algo possible..
The numbers of my main kw results dropped. And old desc. is at SERP at my main kw but if you serch kw+kw1 it becomes fresh desc and tags..I have also seen new results for a while this might be semi update

/Abuz

[Kirby]

I'm seeing Google index much quicker. I was wondering if those dramatic swings in numbers correspond more to the day to day spidering as opposed to the overall size of the index.

[mil2k]

seeing anything between twice to ten times increase in the previous results returned. And I am not counting the increase in number that happened a month ago. It really catches you offguard when you are used to seeing 100k results and instead see 1000k results ;) Not seeing any major changes in SERPS though.

[Plaza101]

My Pages has been dropped from 200,000 to 84,000 a couple of days before. Not sure what's happening?

Is google dropping old pages and adding new one all at once.

With in last 30 days about 300,000 pages were crawlled and only 84,000 are showing now.

Asif