A small speed test for the three major SE's Options

[bwelford]

You may find what I learned from a small test of the three majors of interest. I searched for "Business Blogging Now" with the quotes, after launching a newsletter of the same title. I then checked the SERP's from the three majors at least every 12 hours with the following results. The phrase does occur elsewhere, which is why all the SE's had some entries right from the start. However most of the increases in page counts are other references to the newsletter. [Note - the timing is in reverse time order since that is how I was recording in Notepad: always the new entry at the top.]

050206 06:37 (71 hours) 
                     G has 182 entries but not the newsletter
                     Y has 55 entries but not the newsletter
                     M has the newsletter at #1 and 191 entries
050205 05:00 (58 hours) much more entries for M though still not the newsletter and no longer in G
050204 17:00 (46 hours) no change
050204 05:00 (34 hours) now found by M via mention in BPWrap (blog): still not on Y
050203 17:00 (22 hours) found by G and at #1 but not by Y or M
050203 14:00 (19 hours) not yet found by any - pages found G 38  Y 20  M 28
050203 10:56 (16 hours) not yet found by any
050202 19:00 (0 hours)  Loaded onto website

What I learn from this small exercise:
1. Microsoft has the most entries and put the newsletter at #1 within 72 hours
2. Google has almost as many entries, put the newsletter at #1 after 22 hours but then had dropped it from the SERP's 36 hours later
3. Yahoo! never found the newsletter as yet (the SMM website is not spidered as often by Y! but this is an ongoing situation)
4. The Small Business Ideas Forum and the Cre8asite Forum feature highly in all three SERP's.

[invader]

Why would Google drop it?

[Adrian]

People have been talking about a bit of a Google dance recently, datacentres not matching and that. Might've been mixed up in the update that appears to have been going on.

[bwelford]

You may be right, Adrian. However I think it's saying something more fundamental about the way Google processes web pages. The results this morning were:

050207 05:15  no major changes:
                     G has 218 entries but the newsletter is not included
                     Y has 70 entries but the newsletter is not included
                     M has the newsletter at #1 and 200 entries

So all are finding more references to the newsletter. However my current hypothesis about the Google process is the same I have had for some time.
1. New pages may have a very short-term high visibility when first found by Google.
2. After say another 24 hours, the new page disappears and will only reappear after some full indexing process.

I'll be checking this from time to time to see when Google puts the new page fully into its index.

[mipapage]

Isn't that the way it was with G a while back (in the dancing days, back when Freshbot started up)? Pages would get freshed, rank high for a bit and then disappear until a dance?

[bwelford]

Welcome to the Forums, mipapage.

That's what I was thinking and I started writing the last post assuming that. Then I realized, after checking, that the actual web page was no longer one of the 218 web pages in the SERP's. So for a time it was there and now seems to have been withdrawn, not just down ranked. I'm somewhat intrigued by that finding. :?

[mipapage]

Thanks for the welcome!

So for a time it was there and now seems to have been withdrawn, not just down ranked.

I seem to remember that that is exactly how things used to work - no downranking or anything - 2 or three days of woot! and then 2 or 3 weeks of waiting

I'm interested in seeing when the page pops back in. We also have some fresh pages to add to relatively new (but indexed and pr'ed) sites; I may just test this 'index speed' thing as well and see what happens...

[bwelford]

The plot thickens. Here's the latest results:

050207 18:54 
                     G has 252 entries and the newsletter has come back in at #9 (?)
                     Y has 61 entries but no relation to the newsletter
                     M has the newsletter at #1 and 430 entries

So Google has re-found the newsletter but only put it at #9 behind other less relevant web pages on the website.
Microsoft still has the newsletter at #1 and has more than doubled the number of entries.

This is a ridiculously small test but Microsoft Search is really outpacing Google.

[bwelford]

So after 118 hours, Yahoo! has found the Newsletter and put it at #1. That's about the only change this morning.

Microsoft still has the newsletter at #1.

... and Google still has the newsletter at #9. :?

I'll check from time to time to see when Google sees the light.

[invader]

Barry,

I've been doing quite a following on the SE's the same way.
I have noticed that Google visits the website a lot less frequently,
than MSN does. Yahoo is moderately paced.

Google has, for some reason, dropped my website, which was
in the index for about 3 years now, always on the 2nd or 3rd rank,

This is turning out to be really interesting.

[Adrian]

I've just been doing a little bit of a comparative test of the big 3 myself.
Looking at the top 10 results in Google, Google UK, MSN, MSN UK, Yahoo, and Yahoo UK, for the terms "educational software" and "educational software uk".

I'm actually quite amazed how much the results vary. Now I can't help being at least a bit biased, because they are keywords of interest to me but seriously, some of the rubbish thrown up in the top 10 results in some of these searches is amazing.

Google seems the most consistent in producing what I would consider better quality results.

Yahoo! seems wildly random at times, jsut with those few differences.

MSN produced some pretty good results on 3 of the 4 tests, but the most generic search, "educational software" on msn.com made me go a bit 'huh'.

Using the different engines link: commands, I tested the site that came up top in that sarch. MSN listed something like 137,000 backlinks, Yahoo! (used linkdomain: instead) listed about 27,000, and Google only showed about 1,000. OK, I know Google's backlinks are unreliable in a comparison, but the different between Yahoo! and MSN is still huge!

And it's virtually purely the backlinks that have got that site to number 1 in MSN for one of the main keyphrases in the industry.

Using a similar scenario, look at backlinks to www.phpbb.com. MSN shows just under 45million. Yahoo!, a bit under 19Million.

MSN is crawling a lot of links, and I imagine that must have an effect on the speeds you've been looking at Barry.

[bwelford]

To round this off, perhaps I should mention that this morning Google has finally put the newsletter itself at #1 coming in line with Microsoft and Yahoo!

[fisicx]

Unless of course, Google has been watching this thread and carried out a bit of manual intervention...