Ok we got some supplemental results questions david writes in he says “Matt should I be worried about this, site table1.com returns 10,000 results site:table1.com -intitle:by returns a 100,000 results all supplemental. David in general I wouldn’t worry about this I want to explain the concept of beating path.

So if there is a problem with one word search in Google that’s a big deal if it’s a 20 word search that’s obviously a less of a big deal its because its often not a big impact. Supplemental results team takes reports very seriously and acts very quickly on them, But in general in something in supplemental results is mostly off path than our main web results. And once you start getting into negation or negation by a special operator like -intitle then its pretty off the main path and you are talking about results estimates its not the actual web results but the estimates for the number of results. The good news is there are couple of things which can help in bringing up the result estimates more accurate ah atleast I know 2 things that can influence an infrastructure.

Deliberately trying to make the site results more accurate

Other one is the change in the infrastructure to improve our raw quality

But side benefits is the it gives the estimated number of results to be more accurately when it involves the supplemental results. SO there are atleast a couple of changes that might make things more accurate but in general once you start to get really far from the beginning path -intitle all these stuff specially for supplemental results I wouldn’t worry that much about the result estimates, historically we haven’t worried too much since not many people were interested. But we do hear more people sort of saying yes I am crazy about this so you need to put more effort into that.

Erin writes and says that “I have a question on redirects, I have one or more pages of various moved across various websites I use classic ASP and shows how he gave response for 301. He said these redirects are setup for quite a while and if he runs a spider on them it reads the redirect fine. This is probably an instance where you would have seen this happen in supplemental results, so here is how we can go about things. There is a main web results Googlebot and a supplemental results Googlebot so the next time the supplemental results Googlebot visits that page and sees the 301 it will reindex accordingly and things will refresh and so on historically the supplemental results have been a lot spidered data that is not refreshed as it is done for the normal web results. If you check the cache anybody can verify that the results and the crawl date vary so the good news is that the supplemental results are getting fresher and fresher and the effort is made to make them quite fresh.

For example Chris writes “I like to know more about the supplemental results, it seems while I want in vacation my sites got put there, I have one site that had a Pagerank of 6 and it got put in supplemental results since like May. So like I talked about the fact that there is a new infrastructure in our supplemental results I mentioned that also in blog post and I don’t know how many people have noticed it but certainly I have said that before I think it was in the indexing timeline in fact so as we refresh our supplemental results and start to use new indexing infrastructure in the indexing results in supplemental results the net effect is the data will be a lot fresher also I wouldn’t be surprised that I have some URLs in supplemental results I wouldn’t worry about it that much and over the course of summer the supplemental results team will see all the reports that they receive especially things off the beat infact as I said like site: and operators that are hysteric they will be working on that those return the sort of results that everybody will naturally expects so stay tuned on supplemental results and already its lot fresher and lot more comprehensive than it was and I think its just going to keep improving.