Product image url in index but product page isn't

[Lidders]

E-Commerce site - a few new products were added over a week ago. Within a few days one of the pages had ranked for the main keyword (product name). All good. Few days later the page is no longer in the index - does not show on doing site: command either. Nothing had been changed in the meantime so I'm completely confused as to why this has happened. The image url is now in the index but not the product page.

Another product that was added is also not showing in the index on searching for the product name (and never was as far as I know) BUT the url for the product image is. Why would the image url be indexed but not the main product page when obviously the page has been crawled?

I feel like I must be missing something spectacularly obvious but I just can't think of what it could be. Any/all ideas welcome. Thanks!

[tedster]

There are a few things to take into account. First, things like Image Search and Video Search - various verticals - are actually handled by different teams and infrastructures at Google. They even have their own crawlers such as , although they "can" share the same cache.

The results of each team's work are then integrated into one "Universal Search" result page - but it is a different back end that generates each type of result.

In addition, Google is not just one single database. There are many copies of their data available at various data centers and those copies are not always in perfect sync. This can be especially noticeable with new pages and then things stabilize over time.