No more Supplemental Results in Google

minstrel Illustrious Member

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#1

The Ultimate Fate of Supplemental Results
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
by Yonatan Zunger, Google Search Quantity Team

In 2003, Google introduced a "supplemental index" as a way of showing more documents to users. Most webmasters will probably snicker about that statement, since supplemental docs were famous for refreshing less often and showing up in search results less often. But the supplemental index served an important purpose: it stored unusual documents that we would search in more depth for harder or more esoteric queries. For a long time, the alternative was to simply not show those documents at all, but this was always unsatisfyingâ€”ideally, we would search all of the documents all of the time, to give users the experience they expect.

This led to a major effort to rethink the entire supplemental index. We improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a document was stored in, and once these "supplementalization effects" were gone, the "supplemental result" tag itselfâ€”which only served to suggest that otherwise good documents were somehow suspectâ€”was eliminated a few months ago. Now we're coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we're now searching the whole index for every query.

From a user perspective, this means that you'll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.
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Coda

At this point it's safe to say that the Google search engine works like nothing else in the world. If you want to know how it actually works, you'll have to come join Google Engineering; as usual, it's all triple-hush-hush secrets.*

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* Originally, I was going to give the stock Google answer, "If I told you, I'd have to kill you." However, I've been informed by management that killing people violates our "Don't be evil" policy, so I'm forced to replace that with sounding mysterious and suggesting that good engineers come and join us.
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minstrel, Dec 20, 2007 IP

linkmanager Well-Known Member

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#2

Thx or sharing this good article!

linkmanager, Dec 20, 2007 IP

ninjashoes Well-Known Member

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#3

yes this is very good info, thank you

supplemental is teh devil

ninjashoes, Dec 20, 2007 IP

Wealdie Guest

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#4

Another great post and find Minstrel - I think this is a good move from Google

Wealdie, Dec 20, 2007 IP

speda1 Well-Known Member

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#5

I wonder if this will help smaller sites.

speda1, Dec 20, 2007 IP

KC TAN Well-Known Member

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#6

Thanks for sharing I was about to post this article..

KC TAN, Dec 20, 2007 IP

igme Banned

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#7

Nice to know this one thanks a lot dude.

igme, Dec 20, 2007 IP

AlexFile Peon

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#8

Really good news. thanks!
it's a one more powerful hit towards the black seo...

AlexFile, Dec 20, 2007 IP

sorryle Peon

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#9

Great info. a lot help. thanks man.

sorryle, Dec 23, 2007 IP

w3bmaster Notable Member

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#10

This will be great ....

Thanks for sharing

w3bmaster, Dec 23, 2007 IP

bogart Notable Member

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#11

Thanks for the news.

The supplemental index is still there. But from what I've read, Google is using it more to deliver search results.

bogart, Dec 23, 2007 IP

maroon_cool Active Member

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#12

thanks for the info mate

maroon_cool, Dec 23, 2007 IP

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