The Incredible Shrinking Google Index . . . What's Going On - Bing is Much Larger
By Tom Foremski - August 13, 2009
Occasionally, I will Google myself just to see what content others are linking to and what they are saying. But lately I've noticed that my citations in Google are shrinking. I'm producing ever more content, but Google is finding fewer references.
Let me give you a point of comparison. On March 3 2009 I wrote: Internet Myth: Watch What You Post Because Search Will Reveal Everything Forever.
At that time I Googled "Tom Foremski" and it came up with a search result of 135,000 pages in Google's index.
Today, I did the same, and came up with 102,000 pages in Google's index.
I tried Bing and got 157,000 results.
What's going on? Has Google run out of room? Is it deleting older content from its index? It's grown smaller by almost 25 per cent, at least when it comes to my content. At this rate, by the end of this year it's index will be half the size it was in March.
Is it just me? I've no other points of comparison. Let me know if you've noticed something similar.
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Comments (5)
I'm glad I'm not alone. I saw that the websites I'm working with saw a steady decrease of their presence at Google and a stiff drop in traffic too. First thought I might have upset the Google Ueberlords, but could not think of anything. Bing is not yet taken over and if your traffic is partly based on Google referrals that is bad news.
Posted: August 14, 2009 1:31 AM
I've been wondering about this myself, and, this is the first I've heard of Bing, which, of course, I'll go Google.
My posts are fairly routinely indexed in Google News, though I'm often mystified as to why my posts that seems to be getting a lot of traffic is not indexed and other stuff that's getting less is indexed.
It seems to me that Google News lasts only about a month, unless one makes etra effort to search the Google News archives.
Sending links to the Internet Archive seems to give them a longer life, but I'm not fully sure why. If the Internet Archive picks them up in time, they'll be archived as PDFs, but I've never been able to figure out what else the Internet Archive does.
Posted: August 14, 2009 9:27 AM
Fons, as long as you appear on the first page it shouldn't matter what happens deep in the index. Whenever I write about a person my post will usually appear right in the first five or so results which is great. I'm just puzzled about why the size of the index is shrinking but I have no other points of historical reference to see if other search terms are affected. But I assume they are because why would mine be special?
Posted: August 14, 2009 11:59 AM
I don't agree. Try these two queries:
www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Aepinions.com
28,000 results
and
www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aepinions.com
4.6 million
Posted: August 14, 2009 5:28 PM
Rob: But your example says nothing about historical trends in terms of the size of the index.
I've no idea what is going on. Especially since there is no way to look at every page in the index. For example, in March, I was only able to view 55 pages of results out of a total of more than 1300.
Posted: August 15, 2009 7:25 PM