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Why Do Google Hit Numbers Vary?
Craig writes: "Thanks for the great question. We get this from time to time and hopefully I can clear up some of the confusion. The number of estimated pages listed to the top right of a Google search results page is indeed, an estimate. It's a good estimate but still, an estimate.
There are many reasons why one might see a difference in the estimated number of pages returned for the same query. It's most likely the queries made by your co-workers were sent to different Google datacenters in what appears to have been a round-robin fashion. The index at any given Google datacenter can change slightly over the course of a day (each index is refreshed completely every three to four weeks). Depending on which datacenter finishes a query, the estimated number of results may vary.
Without having direct access to your environment it is hard for me to tell for sure, however, I believe this is the case."
About a month ago, someone posted this story over on K5 regarding the google dance. Good to see it's run by a marketing site, I couldn't think of anyone who might have more of an interest in rankings then those bastards. :P
That's because Google doesn't do boolean searches. It will ignore the or (too common a word) and ends up treating it like an and search.
Insert wit here.
We would all benefit from knowing which are the most popular searches. This, though, is all google offers if I remember correctly.
Wrong. OR is a boolean operator to Google. Check the "Advanced Search" link.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Ah, but Google does have one....well, available at the Googleplex.
Actually, if you use an uppercase OR, it will perform a boolean search. Otherwise, the search defaults to an AND, unless of course you're using doublequotes "like this" to search for a phrase.
It's too bad Google doesn't have one of those things where you can watch everyone's search scrolling down the screen live. I bet there would be a lot of "pictures of mountains" searches right about now.
Try the Google Viewer maybe?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
From a vague memory of the last major /. article about Google, don't they have a censored realtime display of searches scrolling behind their reception desk?
;D
And what you're thinking of is Metaspy - it still has that uncensored option.
Remember cookies are kept in all browsers.
When a search engine finds those relating to their advertisers or 'favored sites' those are 'extended' into a higher level.
Some results may be discarded if certain advertisers don't like you to see those competing sites.
Uhhh, no. A domain can only see their OWN cookies.
It's too bad Google doesn't have one of those things where you can watch everyone's search scrolling down the screen live.
No, but you can have Google scroll the results of your search!! Try this, and other "Google Experiments" at http://labs.google.com
This page at Search Engine Watch has a half dozen or so real-time search query viewers. It also has some quasi-realtime "search popularity" stuff too.
kuro5hin.org article
Google Dance
-dk
so you may connect to any one of several servers. The servers each have different databases to pool results from and different caches to display.
A google search for my site returns our old site that has had dead dns records for nearly a month above my new site. Sometimes my new site pulls into the lead, sometimes it isn't there, and at least one cache has the announcement that the old name was lost and a domain was purchased.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Results can also vary due to the Google Dance.
Google has 7 data centers each with a copy of it's index and these are "usually" mapped to www.google.com. But google also has versions located at www2.google.com and www3.google.com.
During the monthly update there can be different version of the index on each of the 3 versions. A website www.google-dance-tool.1hut.com provides results for a search done on all 3 of googles index.
To check to see if the google dance is happening the most common technique is to check the "back links" for mayor sites like Yahoo by typing "link:www.yahoo.com" into the search box. this will list all the sites with links to "www.yahoo.com".
The Google Dance Tool site mentioned checks google every 5 minutes to see if the dance is on. Once it is started it sends out an automated email to subscribers (like me) so I can visit the site and see what the search positions for the next month on google will be using their google dance tool search.
More likely, those 100-200 people do a search on several words. Your friend should check their server logs to find out what people are really searching for.
Google uses Dmoz as a pagerank source. Just submit your site through Google's forms, I've had stuff listed within 1-2 days.
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
Google Dance Tool is also available a www.google-dance-tool.1hut.com
This site checks every 5 minutes for the google dance and has a alert mailing list for subscribers to get notified as soon as the google dance starts.
And I have the 80,000 hit for the word 'sex' yet I still get 100-200 hits per day from Google and Yahoo.
I think people tend to do more complex searches.
a) did he very (by examination of the "referrer" tag in his logs) that people really went there from a search for "sex" (and not "sex" combined with other words)?
b) people might be tired of "google optimized" webpages and manually insert a "&start=250" parameter in the address line, to skip the commercial sites and browse to the less commercial ones.
Btw, I use the b) technique in Google-Groups to find old postings. The sort-by-date option only sorts from newest to oldest, and by modifying the page number you can directly go to the last page - effectively reversing the sort order.
You may not have noticed, but the following probably appeared at the top of your results page:
Thus, your last two searches (and however many more you tried to do afterwards) look identical to Google.