Fresher Results from Toolbar Search

Staler Results from main Google Button Search

[j_h_maccann]

I just put up a new site, about 2000 pages. I had opened up robots.txt and submitted the URL to Google two weeks ago, but there were NO links to the site anywhere. Googlebot never visited, and the site never appeared in Google--I checked just before launch, no luck.

Two days ago, launch day, I put links to the new site on three well-read sites belonging to other people in the same field. Within a few hours the Googlebot appeared and started reading my new pages.

Yesterday, 24 hours later, I searched for a particular three word term then, and the site did not appear in Google (at all).

Today, 48 hours later, when I search for that same three word term the new site DOES appear, at SERPs #1 and #2, with "fresh" dates saying crawled two days ago. Great success. (And two of the newly-added links to the new site are #3 and #4.)

But ... the new site only appears if the Google search is triggered from the toolbar. If the search is repeated by clicking on the main Google Search button on the page, the new "fresh" results disappear from the top 4 positions (in fact, don't appear at all). Click on the toolbar's search button to see the fresh results; click on the main button to see them disappear. I can toggle back and forth repeatedly.

The toolbar result says "Results 1-17 of about 49. Search took 0.17 seconds." The main-button result says "Results 1-14 of about 41. Search took 0.04 seconds." So the toolbar-triggered search takes four times as long, and returns more results--in particular, the newly-spidered ones are included.

(I saved the two result pages and screen dumps, but on my machine at the moment the result is completely repeatable.)