minstrel
05-20-2006, 12:32 AM
Overe the past few weeks, I have questioned in several posts at the BoG forum and at DigitalPoint whether the problem with sites dropping out of Google's index is really a problem with dropped pages or an intentional or unintentional problem with the site: query. I've detailed elsewhere the reasons for my wondering about this.
Now, Google has at least partially admitted that there is a problem with results returned by the site: query...
Issues with the site: operator query (http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/2006/05/issues-with-site-operator-query.html)
By Vanessa Fox, Google Engineering
We'd like to give you all a quick update on some of the issues you have been seeing when you do a site: search to see how many pages of your site are in the index. We've been refreshing our supplemental results (you can read more about that in Matt Cutts' blog post) and this refresh has involved some serious changes under the hood. Unfortunately, with change of this scale, there sometimes are bugs. In this case, we found a few bugs that affected the site: operator. Some particular ones you may have noticed are that the following types of queries don't return the correct number of results:
site: queries where you type in a trailing slash (such as site:www.example.com/)
site: queries for a domain with punctuation (such as site: www.example-site.com)
We've got fixes for all of these rolling out in the next few days. They didn't come out sooner because we've been testing them thoroughly, making sure you don't get any unexpected surprises.
This bug doesn't involve any pages being dropped from the index. It's the site: operator that isn't working properly. We're freezing all refreshes of the supplemental results until these issues are fixed, and things should be back to normal in a few days.
We'll keep you posted when all fixes have been made.
In the meantime, site: queries without the trailing slash may provide a better result (such as site:www.example.com). If you are checking your site using the Index Stats page of Google Sitemaps, note that it uses the trailing slash in the query, so you may see incorrect results until this bug is fixed.
Thanks for your patience as we resolve this issue.
In my opinion, this is only part of the story but at least it's a partial acknowledgment of a problem, and not the pat "it was a problem with shady linking and it's already fixed" garbage that Matt Cutts handed us this week.
Note to Google: As a suggestion for future Matt Cutts "press releases", please don't start with the assumption that we're all idiots next time? :mad:
Now, Google has at least partially admitted that there is a problem with results returned by the site: query...
Issues with the site: operator query (http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/2006/05/issues-with-site-operator-query.html)
By Vanessa Fox, Google Engineering
We'd like to give you all a quick update on some of the issues you have been seeing when you do a site: search to see how many pages of your site are in the index. We've been refreshing our supplemental results (you can read more about that in Matt Cutts' blog post) and this refresh has involved some serious changes under the hood. Unfortunately, with change of this scale, there sometimes are bugs. In this case, we found a few bugs that affected the site: operator. Some particular ones you may have noticed are that the following types of queries don't return the correct number of results:
site: queries where you type in a trailing slash (such as site:www.example.com/)
site: queries for a domain with punctuation (such as site: www.example-site.com)
We've got fixes for all of these rolling out in the next few days. They didn't come out sooner because we've been testing them thoroughly, making sure you don't get any unexpected surprises.
This bug doesn't involve any pages being dropped from the index. It's the site: operator that isn't working properly. We're freezing all refreshes of the supplemental results until these issues are fixed, and things should be back to normal in a few days.
We'll keep you posted when all fixes have been made.
In the meantime, site: queries without the trailing slash may provide a better result (such as site:www.example.com). If you are checking your site using the Index Stats page of Google Sitemaps, note that it uses the trailing slash in the query, so you may see incorrect results until this bug is fixed.
Thanks for your patience as we resolve this issue.
In my opinion, this is only part of the story but at least it's a partial acknowledgment of a problem, and not the pat "it was a problem with shady linking and it's already fixed" garbage that Matt Cutts handed us this week.
Note to Google: As a suggestion for future Matt Cutts "press releases", please don't start with the assumption that we're all idiots next time? :mad:
