The Big Daddy Data Center (DC)

Following the Jagger Update by Google there were many complaints from website owners about the relevancy of the results that were being returned by the Google Search Appliance. One DataCenter, DC, following Jagger where Google Engineers have been doing testing is known as the 'Big Daddy' data center. This article investigates the results delivered by Big Daddy as at 11th January 2006 as compared to the Google Index.

Big Daddy - Background Information

The Big Daddy Data Center is where Google have been testing out a new 'is neither an update nor a data refresh; this is new infrastructure. It should be much more subtle/gentle than an update' ⁱ. In true terms what the Big Daddy Date Center is doing is returning results that use a newer technology than is currently used by the Google Search Engine and rather than letting it loose on an unsuspecting public it has been decided to allow the results to be seen, if you know where to look, so that feedback can be received on these results.

This data center was named 'Big Daddy' by Matt Cutts, a Google Engineer who writes a highly informative blog, at a recent Pubcon. He knew that this data center would be available to view and that feedback would be requested for it and asked for a name for the DC whilst in a meeting. One of the Webmasters suggested the name 'Big Daddy', it is the name that this webmaster is referred to by his kids!

Where can I find the results generated by Big Daddy?

If you visit the web address http://66.249.93.104/ⁱⁱ you will see what looks like a normal Google Search front end. However 'under the hood' ⁱⁱⁱ the technology is different.

The Big Daddy Results

The core thing that everyone wants to know is 'Are the results going to be different and if so how and why?'. The next sections of this article tackle this question. Matt Cutts stated that Big Daddy 'has some new infrastructure, not just better algorithms or different data. Most of the changes are under the hood, enough so that an average user might not even notice any difference in this iteration' ⁱⁱⁱ. From this we can be led to think that the results are unlikely to be different so we did some tests on phrases, of varying SEO difficulty, to see what we could discover only from looking at the top ten results.

All google.com results were used as the average set across various data centers using the results avilable at McDar.net Google Dance Tool. Big Daddy results were from Google DC http://66.249.93.104/.

What the test show us?

Well it looks like Matt was right on the whole the average web user is likely to see little difference in the web results. However on occasion results differed wildly, how we appear no1 in Google.com for 'Ethical SEO UK'. There were also indicators of sites being treated in slightly diffrent ways, things that only SEO guys and web owners may notice.

General things that we noticed outside of the search engine results themselves include :

• Search Times - Generally the time taken for a query to be completed on Big Daddy was faster sometimes over 0.2 seconds though generally about 0.1 seconds. This may be the new infrastrucre that is being used by this Data Center or it could simply be that there is far less load on the DC and as such it can return results quicker.
• Data Set Size - There were differences in the size of the number of pages that are considered as being possible returns. For example for the search query 'seo' Google.com consistently stated that the size of the dataset was around 29,000,000 where as Big Daddy stated that there were around 102,000,000 pages seen as being possible returns! For 'search engine' Big Daddy had a data set 100% larger than Google.com and for 'search engine optimisation' Big Daddy had a data set almost 3 times larger.
• Response Headers - The Google.com response header seemed as normal however that sent out from Big Daddy had a significant addition 'Set Cookie: PREF=ID=17e6b66c6e55ca75:TM=1136945000:LM=1136945000:S=nC-MRf5lCpD5pyAg; expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com'_iv.
• Duplicate and Near Duplicate Content - Google may visit pages within a website and not include them in the index. From examining the results for site:www.photo-frames.co.uk it would appear that the pages that have been removed are the pages which are dynamically generated and only a variable changes within the text. In essence the pages are near duplicates of each other. This is indicative of Google wanting content to be unique and important

What conSEOquences think web owners should do about Big Daddy.

Matt Cutts mentions that he doesnt think that Big Daddy data will be the norm for a couple of months yet. So there is no need to think that it will change your results dramatically. This means that there is no need to panic. As always we believe that every update or change at Google is designed to make relevant sites rank better. If you do not use unethical seo for your site just keep doing what you do and write more high quality pages of unique content. Please note that this survey was of limited size and there is always a chance that the data listed may be from aberant results and may not reflect the data that is being generated by Big Daddy.

More Information about the google 'Big Daddy' DC

• Search Enigne Watch on Big Daddy
• Google Engineer Matt Cutts on Big Daddy

Footnotes on Sources used in this 'Big Daddy' Article.

1. Big Daddy
2. Big Daddy
3. Big Daddy
4. Big Daddy server session Cookie sent out by the DC when queried

Related Content

1. List of Google Data Centers.

List of Articles on Ethical Search Engine Optimization

: Hotel Industry Booking Study :: The Horror of Site Submit Pro :: What do you need from Your Site? :
: What is Page Rank? :: Page Rank is Dead - Myth or Reality :: The Replacement for Page Rank? :
: Latent Semantic Indexing :: Using Latent Semantic Indexing :: Robots.txt :
: Writing a robots.txt file :: Server Company Link Request :: Duplicate and Near Duplicate Content :
: Web Site Spiderability :: Big Daddy - the new face of Google :: Page Hijacking and 302 redirects :
: To Submit to Search Engines or not to Submit to Search Engines That is the Question? :: Know Your Customer to Know your User :: Black Hat SEO - Dont Do it! :
: April Fools in Search Engine Land :: Search Engines and Menus :: High Rankings - How do Search Engines fit into Your Business? :
: Google - Da Vinci Code the Game :: Removing the ODP description from your MSN listing :: Viewing the Google index from different Geographic Positions :
: Underused HTML Tags :: Company Law Amendment :

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.