Google’s Supplemental Results Query: Broken?
By Matt McGee on Jul 5, 2007 | comments (12)
(I first noticed this on Tuesday, but held off posting in case it was a temporary glitch. A couple days later, I’m assuming it’s not.)
It looks to me like the “show all your Google supplemental results” query is broken. As a reminder, this kind of query is supposed to show only results from Google’s supplemental index:
site:domain.com *** -asdfgh
From what I’m seeing on several domain queries, you get the same amount of results on that type of query that you get with a standard site: query. Here are examples:
Standard site: Query
Supplemental site: Query
Those two numbers should not be the same. Note: On the supplemental query, you may first only get shown a handful of results, i.e., “1-4 of 4.” But if you click the “show omitted results” link, you end up getting the same number of results as the standard site: query.
To my knowledge, this was never an official Google search operator. But unless I missed the news, it looks like they’ve disabled this and made it impossible for us to see a site’s supplemental results.
(Did I miss the news somewhere else?)
Update: Thanks to Michael & Michael in the comments, this appears to only be happening at some Google data center(s). Yet I’ve been hitting the ‘broken’ data center for three days running now….
- Update: Google is removing the supplemental query
Google’s Matt Cutts has weighed in on the discussion last week about the unofficial “show your supplemental results in Google”... - See Google’s Supplemental Index in Action
Interesting discovery by “2K” over at the SEOmoz.org blog — a query format that lets you see what pages are... - What the End of Supplemental Means to You
The end of Google’s supplemental index means webmasters have one less tool to help determine overall site quality (in Google’s... - Gone supplemental in Google? Get out….
I just replied to a post on the Small Business Ideas forum about Google’s supplemental index, and how to get...
On Jul 5, 2007, graywolf said:
works for me
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Asearchengineland.com+***+-asdfgh
On Jul 5, 2007, SoloSEO said:
Not broken for me. Try:
for Andy’s site (1130 results after clicking show all)
for Todd’s site (363 results)
for Danny’s site (246 results)
Maybe it’s just your data center? Try finding another data center IP and changing that out for the google.com in the URL.
On Jul 5, 2007, Matt McGee said:
Yeah, it seems to be a data center-specific issue, then. I used these two and the query still works on both:
66.102.1.107
72.14.203.107
But I go to google.com and whatever data center I’m hitting there — not working.
On Jul 6, 2007, SoloSEO said:
My data center is:
64.233.167.99
Try pinging google.com to find out which data center you use. On a Windows machine, do Start > Run > type “cmd” > then in the new window prompt type “ping google.com”. When you want it to stop press ctrl + c. On a mac open the Terminal program in Applications > Utilities and type “ping google.com”.
On Jul 6, 2007, Ryan_Lash said:
I noticed the same thing this week (on IP 72.14.253.147) and I have a TINY site compared to my peers:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.ryanlash.com+***+-adfsdasdf
Strange, I feel so insecure all of a sudden.
On Jul 8, 2007, Matt McGee said:
It’s still broken for me. And I’m also on 64.233.167.99 … ??