Completely agree. It's easier to predict the weather than try to figure out when Google will run an update, without having inside knowledge.
I predicted last's month update, as well as before. It;s simply watching the overall activity. This month ... Well...It's another thing
No. You GUESSED correctly. That's not predicting. Do you know how many guesses there are for each month? Enough to cover every day of the month and the following few months. Someone's bound to guess right eventually. But let's not pretend it's based on anything more than a guess. It's like slot machine players who think they know how to predict when a machine is going to pay off...
Now, now minstrel If the young man based his guess on observationes of previous actions, you can correctly say that he predicted (or tried to anyway) coming events.
The implication was that based on some set of prior statistics, you were able to correctly predict two upldates in a row. As I suggested, this is the gambler's fallacy: The gambler believes he has correctly predicted that the slot machine will pay off at 4 am on a Sunday based on analyisis of previous records for when that slot machine paid off. In fact, whether or not the machine pays off at the "predicted" time is not correlated at all with the records the so-called prediction is based on -- indeed, the payoff is a totally random event. That's why the "prediction" and the presumed link to previous records is a fallacy. Google is preumably not entirely random but let's face it: It is also unlikely to be based solely or primarily on the date of the last update either. We had another thread here recently where bobmutch was predicting March 26 (this is from memory but some specific date in late March) as the date for the next PR update, based on his records of dates of previous updates. Did it happen on March 26? Obviously not. That's my point: It's a waste of time because no matter what records you are keeping or analyzing, like the man trying to predict the slot machine payoff time, you are doing nothing more than guessing. Forget the records -- flip a coin or just go purely on a gut feeling or check out the thickness of the hair on a caterpillar's back. Then call it a wild guess. Would you then post it? "I am making a wild guess that the next backlink update will be April 6 based on a coin flip!" Probably not. And if you did post that, would anyone read it or take it seriously? Probably not.
I must say your words are truly wise, and your comparation almoust correct. But we can guess sometimes. It's good to have at least an aproximate figure in mind, when monitoring the evolution of one website.
why does google make their updating activity...and all other activity such a big secret? what's the point?
Because the main or perhaps only people interested in such things are webmasters whose primary goal is to find a way to leapfrog their sites over the competition. Since Google's goal is to serve up unbiased and unmanipulated SE results, they obviously have an interest in minimizing the amount of information they publish that would make manipulation of the system easier.
I also believe that there is the factor of competition with regard to Google itself. By this I mean that they do not want to divulge their processes too much to where other search engines (Yahoo, MSN, etc...) can utilize this information to the benefit of their organizations. The same reason why I wouldn't tell a competitor how often I update my site or announce it on my own company page.
If such info's are to be made public, it would be a disaster. Anyway, I think the Google team is having such a leaf now, seeing all the webmasters frustrated about this update
On WebMasterWorld they're reporting that these datacenters appear to have the next update for Google: 66.102.11.99 216.239.59.99 216.239.59.104 66.102.11.104 216.239.59.105 We moved up a fair bit but the number of pages included is significantly less than www.google.com has been reporting for the past few days, making me think that they're checking it over before releasing it.
I manually checked the IPs above with no changes in results, yet. Doesn't mean others are not seeing them, but I see no movement at all for the five sites I track daily.
LOL... yeah that's not something you ever want to see in an established site: "Number of pages in index = 0"... Yikes!
I've noticed McDar's doing that several times a day for the past few days now. It got me at first, but then I heard there were other tools out there with the same problem. Could be G messing with us. Anyway, I'm not seeing anything but the usual a bit of fluctuation between current and past BL counts, and of course, increases in my indexed pages. With the addition of that feature, I have actually gotten good news from G the past few days.