
Published: Sep 13, 2007 - 08:22 pm
Story Found By: Sebastian 4175 Days ago
Category: SEO

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Comments
Sounds plausible, you got my vote.
If Matt Sphinns this article, well take it as an un-official nudge-nudge-wink-wink...
Interesting theory. There may be all sorts of wierd interactions when multiple parameters are used, especially "advanced search" stuff. This one is very new. It will take a week or two for things to become more clear.
Im getting weird results for searches (&as_qdr=y and &as_qdr=y2) for sites of the kind: site:sample-site.com site:sample-site.dk etc...
I havent checked on this myself. Personally, if someone find a search that returns supplemental results, that doesnt bother me that much. Its just that it didnt really make sense to call out the supplemental label to end-users, and the label carried some connotations that no longer applied from the original supplemental index (e.g. that it was months or more out of date).
Thanks Matt for stepping in. :)
You guys need to know how to find supplementals?? Its easy take any website ...say Sphinn.com Enter the various URLs the site has (they should fix the canonical URL issue here)and input them into the Google search box. Results 1 - 1 of 1 for http://www.sphinn.com Nope no supplementals here Results 1 - 10 of about 144 for www.sphinn.com No supplementals found here Results 1 - 2 of 2 for http://sphinn.com In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed. There they are!!! See how easy that is?? Psst Sphinn Admin you might want to 301, use a mod rewrite, or tell Google & Yahoo which URL you prefer Peace!
*** There they are *** Sadly not. If you click on the "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included" link you then get "1 - 100 of 18 400". You found a way to uncover Similar Results, NOT Supplemental Results.
gs1md The other 18,398 pages not displayed would then be considered supplemental if I am not mistaken. I doubt all 18,398 pages are similar .....nice concept, but not the reality.
"You found a way to uncover Similar Results, NOT Supplemental Results." g1smd is right. Sem-Advance, those omitted entries are not supplemental results.
.. .. ..
In fact, Matt Cutts clarifies this point in an SEOmoz article where Sem Advance also makes the same claim. Sem-Advance: "Results 1 - 10 of about 830 for www.searchengineland.com Results 1 - 10 of about 165,000 for searchengineland.com You would think these guys could figure out how to resolve their problem via .htaccess ;-> or that Google would fix the issues themselves, but they wont because they dont care. Organic results are the canvas to carry the true money maker, paid links I mean ads." Matt Cutts: "One fine point to make: when people see the "show duplicate results" link at the end of search results and click it to add "&filter=0" as an extra parameter, the new results you see are not all from the supplemental results. Lemme see if I can find a query to demonstrate that. Ah, here we are, the first one I tried. [site:mattcutts.com foxmarks] returns one result. If I click to see more results, that post has also been indexed at other urls, but at least two of the extra urls are in our main web index, not the supplemental index."
A lot of people are confused as to the differences between similar results and supplemental results, despite it having been explained many times.
@ g1smd & Halfdeck I understand what you are both saying.....but whenever Matt speaks I like to read between the lines at what he has said. Example below from your posting. Matt C quote "the new results you see are not all from the supplemental results." So while some are not from the supplemental index... some are indeed, and I would venture to guess the "some" in this case, is equal to "most". And it also makes sense that similar pages are found in supplemental index..... since there are indeed still two indexes.... similar pages which are not likely to be returned to a users search query....(think dupe content) would then be dumped in the heap pile aka supplemental index. But those are my thoughts....
Sem-Advance, supplemental results are primarily PageRank driven. What does "similar results" and low PageRank have in common? Duplicate content in multiple URLs may go supplemental. Why? Not because of duplicate text, but because of split PageRank. Of course when you have thousands of "similar results" youll have a mix of supplemental results and main index results. That proves nothing. Right now, we have two known (most likely inaccurate) ways of fishing out supplemental results: site:domain.com/* query - which returns urls that are not supplemental and a site:domain.com query restricted by time (which Sebastian pointed out recently)
For sites using the www for delivering content, a [site:domain.com -inurl:www] search also finds a few "Historical" Supplemental Results, as of the last few weeks. That search originally stopped working a few months ago, but now it is back.