1) Why are the API results so vastly different from the results through google.com? 2) How much weight is put on down time? If you're site drops out in the middle of a google crawl, is google going to penalize you greatly for that? Thanks!
1. there is no google.com - there are more data centers, so google.com is in fact a google data center ("closer" to you) 2. google gets whatever you can offer, so down time has to be minimal.