Matt Cutts #6: All About Supplemental Results
Here’s the sixth in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!
Transcription
OK. We got some supplemental results questions.
David writes in. He says:
”Matt, should I be worried about this? site:tableandhome.com returns 10000 results site:tableandhome.com -intitle:by returns 100000 results. All supplemental.”
David, no in general I wouldn’t worry about this. I want to explain the concept of beaten path. So, if there is a problem with like a one word search in Google, that’s a big deal. If it is like a 20 word search, that’s obviously less of a big deal, because its off the beaten path.
The supplementary results team takes reports very seriously and acts very quickly on them. But in general, something in supplementary results is a little further off the beaten path than our main web results. And once you strat getting into negation, or negation by a special operator like ‘intitle’ stuff like that, that’s pretty far off the beaten path. And you are talking about results estimates, not the actual web results but the estimates for the number of results.
The good news is, there are a couple of things that will make our site:estimates more accurate. There are atleast two changes I know of in our infrastructure, one deliberately trying to make site: results more accurate. The other one is just a change in our infrastructure to improve over all quality but as a side benefit, it counts the number of results from a site more accurately when it involves the supplemental results. So there are atleast a couple of changes that might make results more accurate.
But in general, once you really start to get far off the beaten path, -intitle, all that sort of stuff, especially with supplementary results, I wouldn’t worry that much about the results estimates. Historically we have not worried that much, just because not that many people have been interested. But we do hear more people sort of saying, ‘yes I am curious about this”. So we are putting a little more effort into that.
Lets see. Erin writes in. He says:
“I have a question about redirects. I have one or more pages that have moved on various websites, I use classic ASP” and then he has given the response of 301. He says, “These redirects have been setup for quite a while, and when I run a spider on them, it handles the redirects fine”.
This is probably an instance where you are seeing this happen in the supplemental results. So here is how I think about things: there is a main web results Googlebot and a supplemental results Googlebot. And so, the next time supplemental results Googlebot visits that page, and sees the 301, it will index it accordingly and refresh and things will go fine. Historically, the supplemental results have been a lot of extra data but have not been refreshed as fast as the main web results. And if you do a cached page, you know, anybody can verify that the results on the crawl dates vary.
So, the good news is that the supplemental results are getting fresher and fresher and there is an effort underway to make them quite fresh.
For example, Chris writes:
“I would like to know more about the supplemental index. It seems while you wree on vacation, many sites got put there and I have one page where this happened pagerank of 6, since like May.”
So, I talked about the fact that there is new infrastructure in our supplemental resuts. I mentioned that on a blog post, I don’t know how many people noticed it, but I’ve certainly said that before. I think it was in the indexing timeline in fact. So as we refresh our supplemental results and start to use new indexing infrastructure, in the supplemental results, the net effect is things will be a little fresher, I wouldn’t be surprised and I am sure I have some urls in the supplemental results. I wouldn’t worry about it that much. And over the course of summer, the supplemental results team will take all the reports they see, especially off the beaten path like site: and operators that are kind of esoteric and they will be working on making sure that those return the sort of results everybody naturally expects.
So, stay tuned on supplemental results. It’s already a lot fresher and lot more comprehensive than it was and I think its just going to keep improving.
Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis
