oogle results page (SERP‘s) have been unstable recently. This may have affected anyone using Google. It caused a great deal of distress to many Webmasters while others observed a significant, unexplainable surge in traffic. Unlike the many rumours, an article from WWW Coder draws a clearer picture:

Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update were installed last Monday. This update has been staggered into three and a half sections in order to avoid a massive amount of dislocation in established rankings as was seen in previous major updates. While changes stemming from the Bourbon Update have not actually manifested into a full reordering of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), many individual webmasters have reported fairly significant losses or gains in ranking over the past few days.

It is re-assuring to know that the folks at Google keep maintaining and improving their highly-ubiquitous search tool.

Google are making significant changes to their ranking system. The changes have recently been entitled the Bourbon Update and a Google employee spread (leaked) the following information:

Here’s the advice that I’d give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so. Then there will still be some minor changes after that as well. So my “weather report” would be a recommendation that rankings may still change somewhat over the next several days.

Considering the date of this message, the search engine’s behaviour should have stabilised by now.

Google search sometimes requires the ‘scanning’ of many entries. There is no need to step page by page looking at just 10 results at a time. The following will display 100, which is the maximum number:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Your_Search_Term_Here&num=100

To get a more concise view containing just the page titles:

http://www.google.com/ie?q=Your_Search_Term_Here&num=100

It truly is a powerful option.

It appears as though Google removed PageRank from the public. No official announcement has been made though. Google once warned about abuse of public PageRank and trading of links. They were probably most dissatisfied by the involvement of AdSense, their advertising program, in the midst of this abuse.

It is difficult to surf the Web without an indicator of any kind. It is hard to establish trust in information unless there is a measure of reliability bound to it. As a substitute, Alexa rank can be used as part of a Firefox extension called SearchStatus. Alexa rank is not as verbose and dynamic as PageRank, but it is far better than nothing.

SearchStatus in action

For the past day or two, the Google PageRank indicator has been greyed out (or invisible in Mozilla Firefox — see above). There are speculations and rumours regarding the reason:

Is it the end of Google Pagerank as we know it? Is Google replacing or eliminating our ability to read the value of a website (as they see it)

Google’s “Trust Rank” algorithm has been around for a while, but I don’t believe fully implemented. Maybe we’re seeing the change from Pagerank to TrustRank.

The thread makes insightful observations, but the original poster fails to provide information to support his statements. Also, the transition to a new ranking system would have been seamless. Are Google preparing an announcement and halt PR in the interim? This has already lasted too long to be a technical fault.

There are (at least) 3 conceivable methods to keeping track of Google:

• Google Alerts: HTML-formatted E-mails which occasionally get sent. Recent changes in SERP‘s of interest are highlighted.
• Perl and Cron Jobs: keeping track of Google from the command-line.
• RSS Feeds: RSS interface to Google search results (Ben Hammersley).

Domains can now be ranked using the criterion of traffic. This gives insight into popularity, without relying on Google PageRank.

• Go to A9, Amazon’s excellent search engine, which is heavily reliant on Google
• Type in the full name of the URL, e.g. http://google.com
• Hover over the button labelled Site Info to view the figures

Google, by the way, is only ranked 3^rd, MSN at 2^nd and Yahoo! at 1^st.

These ranks include all registered global domains, as well individual parts of the world, most notably Germany (.de) with around 5.5 million. Italy (.it) at second only has 681,779 registered domains.