Okay, you’ve got a fall “search weather” forecast, and it’s mostly quiet. Most of the recent infrastructure changes are out at most/all datacenters. What now?
Well, I thought it might be a good time to collect potential bug reports (not general comments, not questions, and not spam reports). If you know of a query that appears buggy, post it in a comment here. I’ll start the ball rolling.
- high site: results estimates. I believe that more accurate site: results estimates are live everywhere now.
- [site:mattcutts.com -inurl:blog -inurl:files] returns a result or two with “blog” in the url from Supplemental results. This is a known issue that’s pretty far off the beaten path (NOT terms in the url in Supplemental Results is pretty much the definition of off the beaten path query-wise
), but the supplemental folks have promised to look at this.
- I think two people noticed a difference for queries at 1-2 data centers. One person was someone that watches Oxford very closely. The other person was Danny Sullivan, so I heard about it
. I believe this is fixed/working now. The differences for the queries was because we were sending out a newer binary/executable and different data centers had different versions of the binary. Every data center has the newer binary now.
- For a brief while last week, site: only returned three results from a host. Someone mentioned it to me by email, but the first web report I saw was by DaveN on Friday (there’s your link, Dave). Fixed/working by the end that day, I think. It was related to a binary/executable that was going out, but a different binary than the one mentioned above.
- results estimates go up if you add a minus/NOT term. This isn’t a huge deal, but there’s a fix ready to go into a future binary/executable push. That particular push might be a month or two down the road.
- link: queries sometimes showed nofollow links on Google. This is a byproduct of the switchover to the newer infrastructure for PageRank in the Google Toolbar, info: queries, and link: queries. I expect in another month or two that we’ll be back to normal, i.e. nofollow links won’t be shown for link: queries.
Just to be clear, pruning will be ruthless for this post: I only want to see specific queries that seem to show bugs, and the more concisely you can explain something, the better. I’ll probably keep just the first example of what looks like a bug. I’ve got a meeting at noon tomorrow to talk about search bugs, so I’ll probably lock the comments after that
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