Google's Search Results Surge?

I was seeing millions now I'm seeing billions

[dehumanizer]

Hi,

Sorry if this was already addressed, but from time to time I type in some words in google to see how many results there are, simple words such as "love", "war", "press", just for curiosity.

This week I did it but now it is returning in the house of billions. Three months ago if I was typing "love" I was getting nearly 500 million results, now I can see 1.5 billion results.

Is it only me?

Is google crawling the "wayback machine"? =)

Cheers!

- dehumanizer

[Brett_Tabke]

Checkinto the 'bigdaddy' threads...

[Max_M]

Once upon a time Google's results made sense. Now they frequently display nothing more than Google's need to maintain a posture of relevance, while patching things together behind the scenes with ad hoc indexes. These extra indexes have one purpose, which is to keep the Google hype flying as high as their stock price.

[dehumanizer]

This is very interesting.

Thank you for the reply guys.

Cheers!

- dehumanizer

[soapystar]

max_m

its all about opinions but....even with its failings Google remains light years ahead of the competition IMHO....while i believe they are all chasing a holy grail that cant be achieved in the sense we concieve of it today..within current parameters they remain in a different league when you take an overall view of all search engines

[Web_speed]

its all about opinions but....even with its failings Google remains light years ahead of the competition IMHO

I no longer share the same feelings...Their search results are inconsistent and often portray the wrong information.

They are truly no longer the best out there....yahoo and MSN often display much better results to many queries i run daily (mainly programing, Perl, PHP, VB.net) you get to quickly find what you are looking for and normally within the top 4 on first page. You also discover many good old sites that for some reason no longer appear on Google, good quality sites that you almost forgot existed because Google no longer display them due to code errors in Jagger, big daddy and/or big mummy.

[ulysee]

Yeah I see the same thing, Google's search results look a lot like ask.com's search results.

[Kufu]

Google is increasing the size of their index by at least three-fold with Big Daddy. Just do a search for 'www' on Google. If it is their regular index you should see a result set between 8 and 10 billion; however, if you hit a Big Daddy datacenter then the pagecount will be between 23 and 30 billion.

Google does still provide relevant SERPs, but I wouldn't call it light years ahead of the other big two.

I miss AltaVista when it wasn't yet using Yahoo! results.

[pine_needle]

Google has, I think, gone too far in whatever their ranking paradigm is. Is someone on this forum noted, Google's results are poor compared to the results I get from Yahoo. I used Google exclusively since 1998 or 1999, and just yesterday edited the code in Mozilla to make Yahoo the default search engine.

What currently makes Google attractive in the market is the following: Name recognition, momentum and reputation. It loads quickly, but now everyone else does, too. Since google's results are increasingly inferior in quality to Yahoo's, they will lose ground, revenue and share value.

They simply out-smarted themselves, becoming too clever and a little bit arrogant, I think. Web searching isn't rocket science. If you or me or anyone else builds a web page that pertains to rocking chairs, it isn't hard to build a search engine that identifies tier one rocking chair sites.

You look for the use of the words "rocking chair", and then materials, models, images (and quality of images), etc. There just isn't much change to that web model, whether its rocking chairs or rockets.

When google considers links or registration length or other extraneous factors as a measure of relevance or quality, they miss the boat. All they gain from that is a metric for links, or dates, etc. Big deal.

The very best site for anything might only be three pages packed with great information, published a month ago, carries no links at all, sells nothing and is only registered for one year.

I don't sell anything on my site. I write commentary on some important matters. For one of my pages, I am ranked in the top seven (and usually the top three) in every search engine of relevance on the web. Except Google. I used to be ranked number one on Google, and now I cannot find my site in at all. Zero.

So clearly Google has screwed up. It is not that Google has it right and everyone else has it wrong. They have simply hosed their algorithm, and like a big ship slowing down, it takes time for the change in speed to be noticed.

They need to reconsider page titles, and the intent of the page. That's what searchers are doing. Searchers have content in mind when they enter keywords and search results that strongly correlate satisfy the search. One must satisfy the mind of the searcher, not the mind of the search engine developer.

That's my take. Thanks for your good input. The web rocks, and we must keep it open, free and untouched by the government of any nation. Do all you can.

[Kufu]

Since google's results are increasingly inferior in quality to Yahoo's, they will lose ground, revenue and share value.

That is simply not true. Google has gained market share in the latest reports. I can't post external links, but here is a WW one:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Also if you go to Nielsen Netratings, they have a pdf which provides recent market-share info.