Google Big daddy update….
I’m greatly delayed in writing about this, but Google underwent a huge search engine change. I want to say the switch over occured around February 1st or second. I had been seeing 1000 or so visits a day prior to the change (well to be fair 600-1200 a day…) and after the change now see 60-120 visits a day. Yes, the change was that big. eweek tells us some about it. All in all many say that this is improving search results. (I suspect I’d think so as well if my pages were MORE prominent after the update…)
What bothers me is that post-big daddy I now seem to have a HARD time finding content on my own site using googles search. For instance, if I search for “avery j. parker”, not only my name and part of the title of this site, but a part of the domain name (averyjparker.com). I would expect the first result would be THIS site, instead it’s the “sister” site, southcarolinagenealogy.org. Paging through the other results I see many pages that I’ve been referenced, either by filing a bug report somewhere, posting in some forum somewhere, but the home page, which, as far as I’m concerned is the most relevant result….. Page 5 is the first page that has some link to this domain and the link is to … www.averyjparker.com/2005/11/15/sony-discs-to-be-recalled/ instead of the main page…. I see no good reason why that page should show up as being more relevant except for the fact that it may have been referenced by another site (pagerank?)
Before the “big daddy” update, I could fairly easily pull quoted text from an article and reliably find one of my articles. This was EXTREMELY useful to me when I was out on an appointment dealing with a problem that I remembered I had done a “walkthrough” article…. For instance, previously a search for [registry “Compress old files”] would bring me to the article I had written on cleanmgr hanging on the compress old files notice. (Brackets used to signify the search box…) Sometimes I’d need to add [avery] or [avery j. parker] to my search, but it was fairly reliable….. now… EVEN with my name… I’m the last search result before the “supplemental” results.
Of course, I’m also frustrated to see the last cache of the main page was November 8th, 2005…. On other notes, the page rank of the main page seems better than it was pre-big daddy… I used to have a page rank of about 2, now it seems to be 4 on the main landing page (averyjparker.com). It is frustrating though, because at one point, IF, I did a good job writing an article on a focused subject, with the specific topic I wanted in the title (which was also in the link address), kept to topic in the post it was fairly easily FINDABLE. More recent searches for other information have been a bit frustrating for me as well. It seems as though forum threads tend to show up more highly in searches (due to repeated text in the title of a thread repeating down the page as various people chime in?)
MSN Search seems to be more relevant when I search for “Avery J. Parker”, first result, domain that bears my name, followed by another page from same… Followed by 3 more of my sites, that I’ve tagged with my name…. For that matter, two of those domains seem to not exist according to google.
I guess where this is going is that google has become quite a powerful force. Directing thousands of eyeballs per hour. And if a site doesn’t exist in their index, or is ranked poorly, it almost may as well not exist.