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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."
Several weeks back I happened to mention a very nice new restaurant in Toronto on one of my pages, and within days shot to the #2 position on Google when searching for several variants of this restaurants name. I knew this by the fact that suddenly I was seeing closing on a hundred hits per day of people looking for this restaurant. Note that this restaurant has such a unique name that there are only around 5 pages of links in all anyways. Anyways suddenly the hits entirely stopped, and a search on Google found my page was purged from the database: Despite it being a unique name with few hits, it no longer even registered. A week later suddenly it was back in the #2 spot again.
No idea why this happened, but it is entertaining to see it vary.
An "Ask Slashdot" that actually went to the source for the answer first, without the usually bad/wrong/pointless pontificating that normally goes along with it. How long can such a good thing last, I wonder.
:Peter
this and this
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
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.
I think some engine had that (metacrawler)? back in the day, was fun to watch, and I believe they didnt censor it.
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
No wonder I couldn't find the website I was looking for! It was in those missing 10,000 websites. If I had only gotten those and checked through them as thoroughly as I checked the other 1,010,000 then I would have certainly found it.
/. page and the poll from last week appears. You'd think the Uber Midgets and Stealth Ninjas could get it right ;-)
Humor aside, this is pretty interesting. Alot like when you vote in a poll, go back to the main
Posting as directed.
like snowflakes falling
google queries melt upon
different servers
like the wild flowers
each view of the database
unique, yet alike
and...
its that time of month
google dances, results wiggle
w00t first haiku post
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Finally, proof that all Ask Slashdot questions could be more quickly answered by simply checking with Google :)
314-15-9265
Results have been inconsistent ever since they let those damn pigeons unionize. He's obviously covering for the union.
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.
"pictures of mountains" 986,000
"pictures of of mountains" 1,010,000
"pictures of of of mountains" 1,020,000
Two of these pages had a different top-ranked link.
Funny thing, all three times Google told me "of is a very common word and was not included in my search", but it made a difference!
Regardless of these results, Google is the best search engine. Period.
This is for those of you who think he's kidding... ;)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
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.
I nearly always use double quotes to search for phrases. It works extremely well with google. You can also combine multiple phrases, and unquoted terms as well.
In fact, I'm surprised no one else mentioned that searching for "pictures of mountains" (quotes included) yields 1320 hits, which are likely to be much more useful than the other 998,690 or so. Though in this case I really would have searched for "pictures of mountains" OR "mountain pictures" (or done two searches).
If you're not going to use the quotes, there's precious little point including the word "of" in the query.
There are other useful tricks for the google search field listed on the help page, but double quotes is by far the most useful overall.
(another handy trick if you're using Mac IE is to hack the app's resource fork so the '?' address bar shortcut goes to google instead of MSN - a trick expanded on in iCab's built in URL expansion)
Slashdot is right vs. Slashdot is wrong:
slashdot sucks vs. slashdot rules:
slashdot correct vs. slashdot incorrect:
Cmdrtaco vs. cowboyneal
News for nerds vs. Stuff that Matters
Oh, page hits?! Err, nevermind.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.