"Google no longer does periodic updates that cause massive fluctuations, but rather are constantly making changes to its rankings algorithm and search results will reflect that."
I've been exchanging emails with the search engine guru of a major online. The conversation started due to my explorations into perfecting a formula for search engine placement based on how people search, not on how search engines index. The title of this post is a direct quote from that worthy sir in one of his emails to me.
"The number of results you find doing searches will definitely fluctuate wildly over time so it's better to keep a moving average of the total rather than taking any individual data point as the 'true' number. The number of results Google shows after a search result isn't necessarily the total number it has in its index. For instance, Google claims to have only indexed 2.9mm pages from [the online], but that's lower than the total number of articles we have on the site to say nothing of index pages, and we know Google has spidered well over 80% of our articles."
So I match this kind of information with information and data we're collecting elsewhere and start to wonder...
