Search Engine Optimisation Tests
Is Google advanced search broken ?
Google advanced search feature6/05/2006
Last Saturday I threw up a new website - www.booster-seats.co.uk, It is not a site I am going to optimise at all, but instead I am going to use it as a way of experimenting with Adwords.
On Monday 1/05/2006 I thought I would do a quick check at www.mcdar.net to see if any data centers had picked it up yet, and was surprised by the results returned.
As I always do when testing if new pages have been found yet, I searched for a reasonably unique phrase that appeared on the front page and put this phrase in quotation marks. The phrase I used was "booster-seats.co.uk"
The majorty of the first set of data centers returned the expected results, no results. But 2 of the data centers unexpectedly returned numerous results. I tried again on the 2nd page at mcdar, and this time it was about a 50 - 50 split with half the data centres retuning numerous results and the other half no results.
Initially I thought it may be a hiccup at mcdar, but after actualy testing at a couple of different Google IP locations I realised it wasn't. This got me wondering what was happening, and thinking the hyphen and stops could possibly be causing something I set up a test on this page, Search engine optimisation tests.
I got tied up with other things for a couple of days, but then whilst at the Usenet newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines I noticed a post titled "Google web search on phrase returning loads of erroneous results" by QuienES dated 03/05/2006 17:25 (gmt)
The poster talked about exactly what I had just discovered, unfortunately, he wasn't that clear about what he was saying and it appeared to go over the heads of most people. He only received a couple of replies, an interesting one from a David Dermott and then a couple of others. I also replied using my Usenet nicname T.J. telling the OP I had observed this happening and posted a link to mcdar for him to test at.
I was amazed that no one else joined the thread and picked up on what was appearing to be happening, but mainly put this down to the OP not making his initial findings clear enough.
Again, I got tied up on other things for a couple of days, but this morning 6/05/06 I tried the same test at Mcdar again, initialy I had the same results, a 50 - 50 cut. But then I suddenly noticed another set of strange results on 2 data centers, can't explain what it was because as I refreshed the page, the results suddenly reverted back to pre advanced search problems pages.
So in summary:
For a period last week a number of Google data centers were giving completely different result to what you would normaly expect when using the Google advanced search feature, it appeared to be giving the same results you would expect when not using the quotation marks, then on Saturday morning another couple of data centers were giving other kinds of results, which meant a search for "unique-keyword" was using three different algorithms, but by Saturday afternoon all data centers had reverted back to giving the expected results.
More to follow..
New finding: Google is now returning different versions of the same page depending upon what you are searching for, not only that, one version can show as supplemental. Google supplemental results
Please Contact T.J. with any observations.