So what’s the deal with Big Daddy? Any time a search engine updates its system there’s bound to be a few bumps along the road. It’s pretty typical for websites to fall up and down in the rankings or temporarily disappear from the index. However, a report from the Register claims that Google’s Big Daddy update, and possibly its server shortage, has created some instability over the last four months, which is a serious problem.
According to the Register, old extinct pages are being returned on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), there’s a huge delay in crawling times, some sites are completely falling out of the index, and phrases that used to return deep, relevant results, are no longer working as they once were.
This is not only bad news for Google, but for SEO firms, since our business relies on gearing and maintaining websites to perform well within the Google index. We haven’t seen any problems yet, but let’s hope Google solves them quickly.
Have a question and need quick answers? 
I actually think Google likes a bit of irrelevance in the organic listings. They don’t want their SERP’s to be completely irrelevant, but a little mud in the organic results drives CTR’s on paid links and Google’s market cap.
You can read my argument here, if interested:
http://www.jellyfish.com/blog/2006/05/04/how-google-profits-from-irrelevance/
Comment by Mark McGuire — Thursday, May 4, 2006 @ 2:09 pm