A trial update?

Have you been in a Google update test group?

[Wail]

A funny thing happened yesterday. I had rather blatant clickthrough links on my Google results. That's not new. Google does that all the time. It did, however, inspire me to pay a bit of attention - to see what Ye Olde G was tracking today.

It was rather surprising.

My Google results were completely different from the Google results on the machine to my left. My Google results were completely different to the Google results on the machine to my right too.

I had a test group cookie. I'd missed out on the new look Google test cookie but everyone on these forums know how Google trials ideas. I've never heard of them trialling an index update before. Have you? Been in one?

If I've had a sneak peak at the next Google update then I think it's going to be a bit big.

[jsnow]

I've had somebody else mention strange things happening on Google, maybe it was this!

[ogletree]

Fresh tags are still at July 7th. Old freshtags have come before an update in the past. Also I have been getting hits and sales on terms that I don't rank for in G. www2 (216.239.57.104) has been different than www and www3 for several days now. I have seen a lot of spider activity about a week ago on several sites. I agree something is going down.

[Wail]

I compared the timestamps on Google's cache on my machine and another - they were the same. That suggests that Google was using the same data just applying a different algo - but it's not conclusive.

[ogletree]

Google has differnt datacenters all the time. But I do think that something is happening. If you had all the datacenter IP's you could repeat those results. There is a list in the supporters section somewhere.

[ogletree]

I'm seeing new results at 216.239.53.99, 216.239.39.99, 64.233.161.98, 64.233.161.99, 64.233.161.104, 64.233.161.104, 216.239.39.147, 66.102.7.147, 216.239.59.103, 216.239.57.98, 216.239.59.98 plus several more. It seems like it is on quite a few of them. It just never shows up in www for me. I'm going to say it is a little over half the data centers have the new results.

Even the ones that have a new update there are at least 3 different sets of results in there.