Sorry about the title Minstrel There have been some weird goings-on at Google and I have been following them closely. I have established a working theory that something, somehow went very wrong at Google between October 2005 and January 2006. The fine people as Google have been working feverishly to correct the problem, but no matter what they do, the problem(s) is/are cascading. There is a major cover-up going on and it is my mission to expose it.
I am amassing my examples of the 'Great Google Conspiracy' and will post them when I have solid evidence. No problems, just weird goings-on. I think Shawn may be on it too, switching to Yahoo ads and all The truth is out there
The conspiracy theories are definitely out there. Then again, they have been for some time. Ever rebuild a computer, trying to reload everything from an older damaged drive? or even from an older non-damaged drive? Think maybe 20-40 gigs of data to transfer for a home system. Now multiply that by a few thousand or maybe a few million. And it's not one computer - it's a large network of computers. That would take a while. And there would be a few glitches while you were in process. Now let's assume that while you were doing all this, you were also upgrading the operating systems and repairing formulae in spreadsheets and databases on those computers as you went along. That would slow the process down a bit more and require a fair bit of tweaking, checking, cross-checking, rechecking, and re-tweaking as you went along. Pretty big job, huh? While you were in the middle of it, would you describe your network as broken? or would it be more accurate to describe it as an upgrade in process?
In the past few weeks, some of my websites had their indexed pages reduced from 10k-60k to 200-400 pages. It unbelieveable for me at least. Add that to the list. (anyone noticing the same experience with their sites?) Hi Roman.
I'm not so sure there's a conspiracy. Agree, Google could be having some technical problems. In reality they've created a commercial monster that's getting ever more monstrous by the day. I now meet 50/60 year olds that 2 years ago wouldn't have used a computer. Today, they all talk about Google.
Yes. As I said in another thread, the number of pages had started increasing again and yesterday were back down again. But as I also said since (1) PR of the pages on those sites has increased or remained the same, (2) SE rankings have not changed, and (3) traffic has not changed, could it not be that Google is simply not reporting the correct number of pages in the index?
I saw that happen to a site a couple of weeks ago. Went from over 20,000 pages indexed to under 1,000. Today it is up to over 20,000 pages indexed again. SO whatever happened it looks like it was fixed.
I've definitely noticed strange behaviour with Google's search engine and crawlers over the last few months. Little glitches here and there, big glitches with 100s of forum threads everywhere... I don't think I'd call it a conspiracy. Not to be a spoilsport though Minstrel - excellent analogy for rollouts. It really makes you think about the sheer size of the operation to control the amount of data Google hold.
Remember also this is not your average rollout - this is a hardware/infrastructure upgrade, aka Big Daddy.