Ye Old Google Cache

Supplemental results cache shows dated file from Feb 27, 2003

[Slud]

The Google results for a "site:mydomain.com 2003" return a number of "Supplemental results" for my site.

What's interesting is that clicking on the "cache" link for any of those supplemental results returns *very* old cached pages, in one case from Feb. 27, 2003 (the pages have time-stamp footers set by the server).

I don't know if this is new to the "Florida" update, or if this is how "Supplemental results" normally behave, but I thought it was kind of interesting.

Anyone have any verified older cache dates?

[takagi]

These "Supplemental results" are not from the main index but the 'supplemental index' and are only shown when the total results is rather low. Or as GoogleGuy said "If there's an obscure search, we're willing to do extra work with this new experimental feature to turn up more results. The net outcome is more search results for people doing power searches." In this 'supplemental index' are pages that are no longer linked to, or pages that couldn't be spidered recently, etc. So it doesn't surprise me the cache will show a rather old page.

Google Supplemental Results - Where do they come from?
[webmasterworld.com]

Supplemental Result - tag in "site:" search results [webmasterworld.com]

[Slud]

I'm just amazed that Google can serve up an entire page from almost 8 months ago. That's almost getting in to Internet Archive territory!

I think for all the optimization junkies out there this could be pretty significant, since Google could potentially track changes to a site or sites over the better part of a year.

[takagi]

It's even more than 8 months:

we're using multiple sources of data stretching back to 2000 in order to cross-check. ... we are packrats at Google. We never seem to throw out information about the link structure of the web.

GoogleGuy in the thread Good news about expired domains [webmasterworld.com]