Page Count Changes Each Day

Why would page count change each day?

[PhoneGuy]

I have been tracking the number of pages listed from my site for the past few weeks. Over this past week the numbers have stabilized to around 17,500 pages between 7am and 7pm PST and then they jump up to around 20,000 from 7pm to 7am PST. The IP doesn't seem to change but the results do.

Over this past weekend I saw the 20,000 pages all weekend but then this morning at 7am PST I saw the number drop to 17,400.

Has anyone else seen this happening? What's up with that?

[PhoneGuy]

More info on this. My DNS pointing to www.Google.com is changing from time to time. It has been tracking like this (Pacific Time)...

Friday - 2004-02-20 10:51PM - IP 216...
Sunday - 2004-02-22 10:02AM - IP 66...
Monday - 2004-02-23 03:06PM - IP 216...
Monday - 2004-02-23 10:05PM - IP 66...
Monday - 2004-02-23 10:22PM - IP 216...
Monday - 2004-02-24 11:01AM - IP 66...

The 66... IP has the lower count of 17,100 pages while the 216... IP has the higher count of 20,500 right now.

The DNS seems to switch back and forth each day. Doesn't anyone else see this?

[eraldemukian]

I think that is not uncommon. The number of pages is actually an estimate. The query runs only 1000 entries deep into the 'term barrels'.
The algo for the total page count differs, as well as the amount that different DCs come up with.

[PhoneGuy]

That mwy be but I see a difference of 3000 pages between the 2 IP blocks and a definite change in visitors currently online as well as order count. Both are up with 216... and down with 66...

[steveb]

Phoneguy, Google has a few dozen datacenters and they can all be slightly different than each other.

[PhoneGuy]

Thanks steveb - I was aware of that but as these updates have filtered out recently I got the impression that the update had to be loaded into each of the datacenters. Would you be saying that they update the algo's at each datacenter but the data is not in sync?

Would that also mean that each search is different based on where you are, what time of day it is and which datacenter Akamai is send you to?