Comments on: The Google Butterfly Effect – A Search Engine Chaos Theory

By: DazzlinDonna

DazzlinDonna — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:27:29 +0000

Thanks for chiming in, Matt. I have no doubt that scaling this kind of thing is difficult. But, well, although I feel sorry for you personally, it’s kinda hard to feel sorry for a company that has more money than…well..you know… hehe. I’m pretty sure y’all can figure something out. Throw enough brains and enough money at anything…

Anyway, I just know that there have been times, historically, that Google has denied things that they later un-denied, so I just hope that it’s all improving. Crossing fingers….

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:58:52 +0000

I think we’re pretty mindful that any change, even a small one, can affect large numbers of sites. Because of that, we try to do a lot of testing to ensure that changes are a net quality win.

If it makes you feel better, I was all set to ask around about the DNS resolving until I read that Susan was already on it. I think that’s the right idea; getting more people checking on things, reading forums/blogs, etc. means that we hear about stuff sooner and (I hope) respond faster. I was in a bugs meeting today talking about Dan Thies’ post about proxies, for example. Every search engine has to do things like choose the best canonical url, so getting that feedback helps. One of my regrets is that I’m finding myself on the critical path for things like emails, and so we need to find a way to scale that process better.

By: fantomaster

fantomaster — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:47:32 +0000

Your chaos theory reference is a very good analogy. It’s a well acknowledged fact that search engine engineers can’t reliably predict what any given “minor” algo change will result in.
In this sense, it’s actually entirely inappropriate to use categories such as “minor” and “major” (“big/small”) to describe code or algo changes – while it may reflect the amount of programming effort invested (e.g. “only one line of code changed” as opposed to “the entire module of 13,203 lines of code had to be rewritten), it’s quite meaningless on the cause-and-effect scale.
And yes – it’s fairly obvious, too, that Google hasn’t even remotely grasped the consequences anywhich move of their can (and will) have for major parts of the world’s economy. Talk of a sleeping giant…
Thanks for a great piece, Donna!

By: g1smd

g1smd — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:04:47 +0000

The problem with a site:dmoz.org search was that it was polluted with many other subdomains in the list.

Moving to http://www.dmoz.org means that only the directory and the various guidlelines pages will now show up in a site:www.dmoz.org search.

By: David Eaves

David Eaves — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 06:49:36 +0000

I also think that the Dmoz redirect thing hasn’t had enough attention, Google hasn’t even recognised the 301 from Dmoz.org/shopping to the www. one, I thought with a site like Dmoz the redirects would be picked up on within days, they should have stuck with dmoz.org and done it the other way around, also all of them 60+ regular directories that have been penalized has probably had an impact.

By: DazzlinDonna

DazzlinDonna — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 02:07:32 +0000

Good points, g1smd, good points!

By: g1smd

g1smd — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 01:03:19 +0000

One small ripple that might be having an effect is the complete reindexing of the ODP now that they redirect all requests to http://www.dmoz.org where previously both www and non-www for both dmoz.org and dmoz.com were all indexed. That must be having a small PR and backlink effect for some sites. Who knows how that ripple spreads?

Additionally, the Google directory was updated for the fist time in 18 months just a few weeks ago. What effect will that have on sites recently in, or recently out, and how far will that particular ripple spread?

By: DazzlinDonna

DazzlinDonna — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:55:54 +0000

Jon, I’m sure there’s some kind of “parents telling you a story about something in China” Freudian thing about that. 🙂

BlogEx, that is the way we are made to feel, imo.

By: BlogEx

BlogEx — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:13:28 +0000

Donna, as usual, I couldn’t agree more.

Does anyone remember the Simpson’s episode where Mr. Burns builds a giant shade to block out the sun? To me that’s similar to what Google does. Now I’m sure they don’t intend to make mistakes and end up blocking out the sun but that’s not much consolation when you’re sitting in the dark.

They need to get down off their “oh we hire PHD’s” high horse and admit they make a ton of mistakes and even the smallest one can have HUGE consequences. I think a large reason they take so long in responding is because they place too much faith in their employees abilities. I mean how in the world could us lowly SEO’s find a mistake made by their amazing engineers?

By: Jon Kelly

Jon Kelly — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:03:29 +0000

Donna, I love the comparison to the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a tornado half a world away. That’s always been one of my favority saying (though in my telling, the butterfly is always in China for some reason).