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

By: What Obligation Does An SEO Blogger Have? | SEO News - All The SEO Scoop

What Obligation Does An SEO Blogger Have? | SEO News - All The SEO Scoop — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 14:05:12 +0000

[...] me give you an example of a recent post I made. In the Google Butterfly Effect post, I made a claim that I believed an error in Google’s crawl process caused some ripple [...]

By: WBW (Worldwide Blog Wrestling) Presents… » Why SEOmoz Needs A “For Entertainment Purposes Only” Disclaimer

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:30:35 +0000

[...] while the debate surrounding his self serving review of Aviva may have in fact had some sort of butterfly effect that had something to do with their rankings dropping, it would have had nothing to do with any [...]

By: Google Finds, Admits To, and Fixes DNS URL Timeout Issue | SEO News - All The SEO Scoop

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 13:17:56 +0000

[...] week ago, after Barry reported about a Google Groups thread , I followed that up with my Google Butterfly Effect post, and its follow up [...]

By: This Week In SEO - 9/14/07 - TheVanBlog

This Week In SEO - 9/14/07 - TheVanBlog — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 01:49:46 +0000

[...] 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!