Google Drops the Ball

Google is the most widely used search engine and the recognized leader in search techniques. They're continually improving their algorithms and tweaking the processing of their responses. This month, Google dropped the ball and lost a significant part of their search results.

Google ranks and evaluates sites in a reiterative process. First Google scours the web, looking for all the sites it can find. It goes through all the sites it presently knows about, looking for links to new sites, then it checks out the new sites and finds more links, then it checks out those sites-- until they finally declare a halt. This is called "spidering the web", and they do this about once a month.

Then they look at all those sites, and for every site they've found - say, acme.com, they calculate the number of other sites that link to acme.com. Each one of those links pointing at acme.com is seen as a "vote" for the importance of acme.com. So each site gets an "importance" rating that affects the order that sites are listed in.

Then Google does a third pass through the process; all links are not created equal. A link from a highly rated site counts for more than a link from a minor site. This three-step process is referred to as the Google-Dance. Then in the following month the dance starts again, building on the links and ratings determined in the previous month.

When they started the June Google Dance, Google implemented some new search and ranking processes, and it seems like they dropped the ball. Older listings were still in there, and brand new listings were still in there, but a lot of intermediate-aged listings were lost. Search results varied greatly with whichever Google server you lucked into connecting with.

As of July 1, it seems like Google is reassembling it's data and returning more robust responses again.

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