Has Google shrunk it’s index or cleaned it out?
Posted by
Scott on
December 3rd, 2007 .
Anyone else noticing the change in Google today?
The Results 1-10 of about xxxxx has shrunk hugely for all the keywords I keep an eye on.
For example ‘tattoos’ used to bring up around 30-40 million pages
After this morning I only see around 5.5 million,
that is quite a drop, also seeing this whether I am signed in or out of Google and not only in Google.co.uk, I am seeing a drop in Google.com as well. Is this a clear out or just a massive adjustment?
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I track the phrase “orlando villas”. Down from 2 million to 225,000.
It was 4 million a few months ago, so this has happened before I think.
Perhaps they’re just dumping more into the supplemental index. (where it belongs…)
Looks like a Google query for “tattoo” returns around 50 million results pages, and a query for “tattoos” returns over 23 mil - at 9:50 a.m. MST on Dec 3rd. Did you check all the datacenters when you noticed the strange fluctuation in pages indexed?
They have reverted back again now but were checked from various IP’s this morning, strange.
I am not surprised to be honest
google used to have so much indexed which wasn’t that useful
however now it hopefully shrinks it to the most useful bits
I see that the numbers are back. Maybe they were tweaking something in the algoritm, and you noticed.
that varies depending whether you’re signed in or not.
It seems like Google is always tweaking it’s listings. One day you’ll see 2,220,000 for a term. And you’ll look the next day and they’ll list half of that. I’ve given up long ago trying to figure them out.
I have been noticing the same for months and the reductions seem to have continued into January 2008. I’ve seen halving for the terms we track but nothing quite as drastic as the figures being reported above.