Bye-Bye Supplemental Results in Google Search?
Google Webmaster Central Blog Supplemental results are officially dead. Back in August Google announced that the results would no longer be displayed to viewer. Google not really explaining how they have dealt with he problem. Supplemental results existed as a place to dump pages Google suspected were URL’s that were suspect i.e. duplicate content, not original content, superfluous content, etc. I believe that supplemental results exist because having to deal with all that data poses a significant resource problem and being able to dump “suspect” let Google get away with dealing with that content less often and using less resources.
From a user perspective, this means that you’ll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.
Hidden behind this are some truly amazing technical feats; serving this much larger of an index doesn’t happen easily, and it took several fundamental innovations to make it possible. At this point it’s safe to say that the Google search engine works like nothing else in the world. If you want to know how it actually works, you’ll have to come join Google Engineering; as usual, it’s all triple-hush-hush secrets.*
Many site owners with badly built sites were prey to dreaded supplemental results pages hell. I once battled for months on a mess of a site that the owner and builder kept defending.
It really would take some kind of huge engineering feat to successfully crawl and index ALL THE WORLDS information so I suspect they are treating URL’s that would have been labelled as “supplemental” in a similar way but calling it something else.
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