Talk:DP World
Query
Anyone understand erratic Google search results? A few days ago the SW page on DP World was right up the top of the search results. Not it is not there at all, disappeared. The page is still here and working fine, so the problem is not at our end. (Other pages still appear high in Google results so it is not somethinf SW wide). Over at Yahoo the DP World page is no 16. Anyone understand why it would disappear from Google altogether? --Bob Burton 17:24, 3 Mar 2006 (EST)
Answer?
One explanation is that since the SW article posted there has been a fury over the P&O takeover by DP World. Articles which were most likely at the bottom of the Google search list regarding the deal now predominate the first pages of Google results. The articles which came up earlier were about the controversy; the ones which come up now are about the deal. As one blog mentioned, DP World has become world famous. Before the controversy, it was only a star in the container and ports communities.
As for why it may appear to have disappeared? The focus has shifted, for now, by those seeking info on the deal, which has pushed those articles up in ranks and SW downward. --Artificial Intelligence 04:01, 4 Mar 2006 (EST)
- Bob, a very belated reply to this question! I'm not an expert, but there are two reasons that I know of.
- Difference between a deep crawl and a shallow crawl. Google only fully indexes the web every few weeks. This is known as a deep crawl. When it does a deep crawl, it calculates the rank of each page individually based on inbound links, page content, etc. In between deep crawls, Google is continually shallow crawling the web, looking for new pages. When it finds new pages, it estimates the new page's rank (based on the page rank of that website's home page?) Thus, if Google finds a new SourceWatch page that is actually quite poorly served by inbound links, it will tend to overestimate that page's importance until the next deep crawl. I have seen pages i've contributed to SW "disappear" from the results in this way after a few days or weeks.
- The Google Dance: while the results of a new deep crawl are being propagated out to all of Google's servers, the results can be very erratic. During this period of a few hours, pages can temporarily disappear from the index.
- The above answer is probably riddled with mistakes cos i'm not an expert on this, but I believe it works something like that ! --Neoconned 00:23, 8 Jun 2006 (EDT)
- Tks for that; makes sense. I'll drop you a line about a follow up point. cheers --Bob Burton 01:40, 8 Jun 2006 (EDT)
Hi - I've just updated the links on the DP World Key People, none of the previous ones worked. Probably because DP World changed their website. - Stan-Ley
