Google is dancing

Expect the full update to appear within the next day or so. You can check the new version at www3.google.com

Hi JF

You couldn't spare 5 mins to tell me about dancing, google that is (I gave up trying to dance years ago myself, except on special occasions with a belly full of beer)

Cheers
Jamie

JF can probably give you a better explanation than I can, but in his absence, here I go...

Basically Google updates it's "database" of sites every month, i.e. all of the web pages in it's directory. This usually takes a few days and so to ensure that the main site at Google isn't disrupted when this is happening they use www3.google.com and a couple of others. Then when the update is complete the results are displayed on www.google.com. This way you don't get conflicting search results while the update is happening on the live site. Foe example when google is updating you could search for "eggs" on www3.google.com only to find that a day later you could search for eggs again on www3.google.com only to get a completely different result. This is because google is "dancing" or updating. Obviously as google is so huge this takes a few days so normally the google dance can be seen towards the end of every month. I hope this helps.

Kieron

Sorry about the slow answer, I didn't see the question first time around.

What Kieron said is a pretty good summing up, but one thing I should correct is that when the "dance" is happening, the results from www.google.com do vary, sometimes you'll get the old results, sometimes the updated ones. The new results will appear on www3, and remain fairly consistent during the dance.

The first time I saw this happening I didn't know what was going on. I kept finding Google searches in my referrer logs, but when I did a Google search I couldn't find my site.

You can probably find a better answer (and loads more Google info) at searchengineforums.com/bi...LastLogin=

As far as I understand the procedure Google uses to calculate the page ranking the importance factor fluctuates a lot during the process. Apparently they calculate and recalculate it based on the results of the previous calculation. This is done until they get a stable factor.

Example: After the first calculation your page might have a ranking of 2.80 while in the next calculation your page ends up with a ranking of 0.75. The next calculation might be high again etc... until you end up with a 'stable' ranking of 1.79...

As JF already mentioned, you can find all the info you need on the search engine forum. A couple of weeks ago I noticed a link in one of the threads pointing to a document that explains the procedure in detail.

Wouter

Thanx for your time..

thats cleared that one up. Keeping track of phrases and new technology can be quit daunting. i generally feel as though i spend most of my time trying to keep up with everything. i think i can safely say i learn something new most days...which can stretch my poor cells

Staying on the subject of Google do you find adwords work well for you..

Jamie

Jamie,

I was going to start a thread on Adwords Select and other PPC engines. I've tried Adwords Select and Overture and if I'm honest I've found that Adwords Select works better for me. The other thing I like about Google's program is that it shows you your ad's click through rate whereas Overture only shows you clicks, not impressions (at least I don't think it does, but I've not played around with all the reports yet). Also, Google doesn't have a 2 - 3 day wait to get ads approved. You can get an ad online in a matter of minutes.

Has anybody else any experience with the PPC engines?

Kieron