January 3, 2005

New Google filter flaws search results

Written by brian_turner

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There are growing concerns of technical problems with Google’s index of websites. Although complaints of websites losing rankings are very common on webmaster forums, this time it’s backed up with some odd observations of a possible filter wrecking Google’s results.

Google normally returns up to 1000 results where the demand allows. However, Google currently is unable to return a full 1000 results - even for the most competitive search terms.

One of the most affected search terms is for “Yahoo”, the major web portal - and search engine rival - that Alexa has consistently ranked as the most visited domain on the internet. A search on Google.com for “Yahoo” will currently return only 48 results - most of which are Japanese language pages.

The issue seems to extend beyond immediate rivalries, though, as even the most common words on the internet are being returned with far less than 1000 pages, for example:

902 pages of about 100,000,000 for casino
851 pages of about 96,000,000 for porn
900 pages of about 616,000,000 for internet
911 pages of about 1,010,000,000 for web
914 pages of about 376,000,000 for computer
951 pages of about 8,000,000,000 for the

In the public discussion Only 31 results shown for Yahoo, experienced SEM’s Mel Nelson and Marcia Welter identify it as a possible filter, as adding “&filter=0″ to the end of search results will normalise them.

The actual method of the filter is unknown, but so far it appears to be removing significant sections of the internet from Google’s results without apparent justification.

Filed Under Marketing