Google changes the supplemental index

Johannes Beus
The supplemental index, in which Google saved pages that fell short of the first, normal searchindex has been a topic in this webblog more frequently this year. A while ago Google announced that the borders between the two index variations would be reshaped to become more transparent and variable. A first step was done by erasing the notice that the result came form the second index a few weeks ago and it seems that Google executed profound technical changes last weekend. While the numbers, that Google returned for a “Site:-inquiry”, have lately become continually less, they literally exploded for many projects to up to ten times their former value in the night from Saturday to Sunday. The reason for this is that before, this query only resulted in pages from the first index being shown while now all hits are counted.

For this Google has also taken a stance in a blogposting and emphasized that this step also has an effect on the findability of websites in this supplemental index. Now they will search the complete index for every searchquery, a fact that I was already able to detect in the SERPs in the last few days. That the conversion did not go off without a hitch can be seen in the rate of change in our “IndexWatch” tool: there we measure by how many percent the SERPs changed in each case in comparison to the previous day. While this amount was usually within a very confined corridor between 2 and 3,5 percent, it caved in noticeably during the conversion and has climbed to a record high since yesterday.
Johannes Beus - on Thu (12/20/2007) at 14:50 PM

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