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What's Wacky with Google?
There are always going to be oddities with any big online service, but this one seems to be persisting. Join the discussion in trying to figure out a pattern. For maybe a week, Google has been returning zero results or "1-1 of about xxx,000" for common searches. One-word searches seem unaffected, but there are certain two-word combinations of common words like
candle truck
or
speaker bracelet.
Reversing the order can affect searches too:
motorcycle candles
vs.
candles motorcycle.
The strange thing is that usually the 1 or 2 results found are to commerce sites. Read the
Search Basics,
compare your notes to
GoogleWhack's,
have fun looking for patterns, but remember that Google always returns slightly different results for different IP numbers.
(Update: 13:56 GMT by J : When I first posted this story it said the problems have been occurring "for several weeks at least" -- but it seems to be more like one week.)
Check out this - all 25 hits on the quoted words "candle truck" should be showing up in the non-quoted search ...
"q=site:www.google.com google" - (third result)
This is what I'm seeing...
http://www.sminkybang.com/google.png
For any who are interested, Google.ca is behaving correctly. All search results listed (that I've tried so far) from googlewack.com are working properly and returning 1-1 of 1, or displaying as they should.
I wish I could compare to google.com, but for the past year or so, google.com automatically forwards all canadian IP's to google.ca
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
I spoke with a friend who helps maintain the google engine. She said that they were running into some problems with a "cleaning agent." Because of all the sites taking advantage of the word revelancy, there are useless sites that simply have a list of words or phrases. It's been posted before that there are many pages designed for GATOR/GAIN spreading or other spyware/adware. She quoted the percentage of junk pages being at 35% to 40%. The cleaning agent was supposed to run through its own searches and check for junk and keep a log.
She didn't say if the problem was that the cleaning agent was clogging searches or if any logged junk pages had been blocked. If so maybe the agent is flawed. In any case, they've stopped using it for the time being.
The counts have been broken for the last five weeks. A count for the word "the" produced fairly consistent results until then of about 3.4 billion. Then it shifted five weeks ago to 5.2 billion. Lately it has been under 2 billion. Now it's just over 2 billion.
Webmasters who have various directories and know exactly how many pages are in each directory, began noticing five weeks ago that Google was reporting approximately twice the number of pages in each directory than have ever existed in that directory. Prior to five weeks ago, Google used to be fairly close to the actual number (assuming that you get a full crawl).
GoogleWatch speculates on the reason why Google has been behaving strangely ever since it stopped doing the traditional deep crawl once per month. The last standard deep crawl was in April but it wasn't used -- Google threw out this data (by their own admission) and reverted to earlier data. The speculative piece was written last June.
Since it was written, Google has started showing "supplemental results" on many searches. It looks like they are running a parallel index. Why would they do this? All the problems Google has been having, along with the supplemental index, seem to support GoogleWatch's theory.