# My google numbers are up and down- whY? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [May 6, 2004, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-google-numbers-are-up-and-down-why/243906 "2004-05-06T20:31:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![TV\_time](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f17d59/32.png) [@TV\_time](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TV_time)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2004, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-google-numbers-are-up-and-down-why/243906/1 "2004-05-06T20:31:54Z")
I have a rather unique name and I googled it one day and had four or five listings. I don’t know why I googled it, maybe its like when my father used to check the obituaries regularly. “Just wanted to make sure I’m not in there,” he would say. Anyway about a month ago, my count started going up and as of Wednesday I had 58 listings but they only displayed about 15 or 16 of them on two pages. Today I am down to 46 but now they are showing 23 on three pages. Seems weird - why the weird number differences? Most of the stuff goes back years and some actually go back decades. TV ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2004, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-google-numbers-are-up-and-down-why/243906/2 "2004-05-06T21:13:33Z")
Google’s searching and rating algorithm is a secret. So the following is based on how _I_ would do things. There are a lot more pages to search than a search engine can possibly index plus old pages are disappearing all the time and you have to check up on those too. So you have to allocate limited resources to doing both. If a search term is used a few times, pages that list those terms should have their links checked (which in turn might also contain the search term). Previously indexed pages need to be checked to make sure that they are still online. So you _might_ be seeing: 1. Your hits increase due to added indexing caused by previous searches. 2. Your hits then decrease due to previously indexed pages have been “found missing”. There’s also a lot of other issues dealing with distributed file processing, multiple servers and such that can make results vary even within a few minutes. ---
**Author:** ![TJdude825](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dec6dc/32.png) [@TJdude825](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TJdude825)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2004, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-google-numbers-are-up-and-down-why/243906/3 "2004-05-07T00:02:45Z")
I don’t really know how Google works, but at the end of your search it usually (always?) says > [@](#): > > _In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the [whatever number it is] already displayed. > If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included._ Maybe some pages move in or out of the Omitted List, but I wouldn’t know exactly why this happens. ---
**Author:** ![robinc308](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b782af/32.png) [@robinc308](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robinc308)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2004, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-google-numbers-are-up-and-down-why/243906/4 "2004-05-07T02:25:54Z")
Google themselves say that this can happen [here](http://www.google.com.au/webmasters/2.html#B1). > [@](#): > > We update our index about every four weeks. If you happen to enter the same query repeatedly while we are in the process of posting the index at our various data centers around the country, it might seem like you are seeing inconsistent results from Google. What is actually happening is that you are seeing a result from an ‘old’ version of our index one time and a result from a ‘new’ version the next. Due to the size of our index, we can not simultaneously post a new index at all of our data centers, which may result in this behavior for a short period of time ---
**Author:** ![TV\_time](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f17d59/32.png) [@TV\_time](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TV_time)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2004, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-google-numbers-are-up-and-down-why/243906/5 "2004-05-07T04:26:11Z")
Very intelligent answers - Thank you. TV