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For the last 30 days, Google has been doing strange things. No webmaster who follows Google closely will deny this. There is no explanation from Google apart from some vague hints from "GoogleGuy," an anonymous poster at webmasterworld.com, whom the forum owner says is from Google. These hints claim that new algorithms are being put into place, and that this will take a couple of months.
Another possible explanation, entirely speculative, is quite intriguing and fits the facts better than GoogleGuy's vague assertions of an algorithm change. This explanation was obliquely denied by GoogleGuy, at which point the pro-Google forum owner, Brett Tabke, moved the thread off of the active list. The next day this thread was locked against further postings. Since GoogleGuy has been known to make strong denials on other matters, this amounts to a nondenial.*
We'll call this intriguing explanation the "Y2K+3 problem." It's all the more intriguing because Mr. Tabke, an able programmer, made a misleading posting to the effect that adding another byte to the webpage ID number to fix an integer overflow problem was "child's play," and called the thread "bogus." The behavior of GoogleGuy and his crony Mr. Tabke look like a cover-up. Hopefully this Google Watch summary page will encourage more discussion of what's going on at Google, even if webmasterworld.com won't.**
First, an explanation of what's different at Google over the last 30 days. This sort of behavior is entirely unprecedented in the 2.5 years we've been following Google:
1. There were some strange results observed when the previous update kicked in on April 11, but webmasters became universally concerned in May, 2003. It took about two weeks for the May update to propagate to the nine data centers. Normally it takes around five days.
2. The May data showed half the number of backlinks that webmasters were accustomed to seeing on their sites.
3. The May data was from a previous update in February or March, and not from the usual deep crawl that occurred in mid-April. It was as if the April deep crawl had been thrown out. GoogleGuy essentially confirmed that this was the case. Pages that had been created since February or March were, as often as not, missing.
4. Slowly, the freshbot began to add more recent pages once the May data settled. But as is typical with freshbot data, these pages persisted in the index for two or three days, and then dropped out of the index. Then they'd pop up again a few days later. This yo-yo effect got the attention of a lot of webmasters who weren't used to this sort of instability. Freshbot normally handles fresh pages this way, but all of a sudden, the definition of "fresh" covered about a three-month span. Usually the freshbot has a dramatic effect only on pages that are new since the last deep crawl.
5. The PageRank of these "fresh" pages is indeterminate. It takes a deep crawl plus several days of calculation to compute the PageRank for the entire web. Without the April deep crawl data, the PageRanks that appeared were from February or March. Any "fresh" pages since then showed no PageRank at all. Normally the toolbar would approximate the PageRank for fresh pages, based on the PageRank of the home page, but it stopped doing this also. All it showed was an all-white or gray bar. This also attracted a lot of attention from webmasters. The more crawling the freshbot did, particularly on home pages for dynamic sites such as blogs, the more webmasters noticed that their PageRank was no longer showing on the toolbar. It is still unclear whether the real PageRank (as opposed to what the toolbar shows) is also indeterminate. The only way to judge this is by the rankings for selected keywords. Some webmasters reported massive fluctuations in rankings, suggesting that the PageRank component of the ranking algorithm was indeed broken. This was in addition to the fact that the pages would drop in and out of the index.
6. The deep bot has not appeared since the end of April. It is unprecedented for Google's deep bot to be AWOL for six weeks running.
"A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. Do you think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a fuckin' cross? It's kind of like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on."