Comments on: You are what you index http://www.earnedlessons.com/2009/05/12/you-are-what-you-index/ Customer Joy. Employee Success. Investor Wealth. Thu, 27 May 2010 16:46:17 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Greg Linden http://www.earnedlessons.com/2009/05/12/you-are-what-you-index/comment-page-1/#comment-27 Greg Linden Tue, 12 May 2009 16:21:46 +0000 http://www.earnedlessons.com/?p=244#comment-27 I seem to recall that a few years back both Amazon and Microsoft had problems with this. Amazon vastly expanded their index by adding in the content of many books. Microsoft Live Search made a big push to increase the size of their web crawl. In both cases, the index bloat caused many new false positives, and relevance plummeted. They both took years and much time and effort to improve their rankers to the point that they could weed out all the false positives and get back to their former level of relevance. I seem to recall that a few years back both Amazon and Microsoft had problems with this. Amazon vastly expanded their index by adding in the content of many books. Microsoft Live Search made a big push to increase the size of their web crawl.

In both cases, the index bloat caused many new false positives, and relevance plummeted. They both took years and much time and effort to improve their rankers to the point that they could weed out all the false positives and get back to their former level of relevance.

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