Back in December Google announced that they were taking feeds out of their main search results. They had used information from feeds in the search results because it helped get fresh information into the search interface most people used very quickly. However, feeds created problems for them since they are a form of duplicate content, since the feed has the same content as a web page in most cases and many feeds can have the same content. [They continue to offer Google Blog Search which is an index of feeds, but rarely used by average web surfers.]

I figured this meant things would take slightly longer to show up in the Google web search, but that’s not the case at all…

Just before lunch today I wrote a post on my personal blog on why we have changed vets - from Scott Luckow back to West Chelsea Veterinary Hospital. When I came back from lunch about an hour later I did a Google search for “Scott Luckow” and see that the post I wrote an hour earlier is showing up as number 3 and 4 in the search results. I wasn’t sure if it was some sort of effect of personalized search (even though I search with personalized search turned off), so I remotely controlled a server and did the same search. This time the pages are in positions 2 and 3…

You’ll see a couple of things in the screenshot. First, Google has gotten the relevance issue tackled and lists the page with the post first, not the home page of the blog, which would have higher PageRank, but in the end be less relevant to the search. Second, the fact that the home page is listed at all on this search means that in the hour since I did the post they crawled not only the post page, but the home page of the blog as well.

That’s actually pretty incredible. Up until this particular case I had noticed that they generally ignored my personal blog… So to have that level of quickness on a blog they don’t feel is important shows how incredible their system is.

The bottom line is that Google hasn’t stopped using feeds in their primary search results, they just use them differently. Rather than directly using the contents of the feed, they crawl new pages they find in feeds immediately, index them, and incorporate those fresh pages in their search results. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s really the best way to get things done.

Tags: freshness, speed
Categories: Blogging, Feeds, Google, SEO/SEM, Search Engines