Who’s your BIG DADDY? Progress Update.
On February 1, 2006 Matt Cutt updated everyone on Big Daddy’s progress and answered some very insightful questions. Here are the excerpts in case you missed it:
“Bigdaddy continues to roll out and is now available at three data centers. In addition to 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104, Bigdaddy is now up at 216.239.51.104. We’ve been going through the spam feedback and acting on it, and reading through the general search feedback as well.
Q: Is Bigdaddy still on track and launching?
A: Yes. Remember that Bigdaddy involves new infrastructure and is not just a data push or algorithm update. Don’t take it as a promise, but I’d expect a new data center to be converted to Bigdaddy roughly every 10 days or so. Again, take that as a rule of thumb. There are smart folks doing this transition, and they’re deciding how to do it in the best way.
Q: Will those IP addresses always show Bigdaddy results?
A: No, not always. Sometimes data centers are taken out of the rotation for testing or other reasons.
Q: Is there an easy way to test if a datacenter is running Bigdaddy?
A: There’s not a definitive way outside of Google. But the [sf giants] example that I mentioned in my pre-Bigdaddy 302 post remains a pretty good test. If the query [sf giants] returns giants.mlb.com, the odds are pretty good that you’re hitting Bigdaddy.
Q: How will I see the switchover happen?
A: It will happen naturally as more data centers switch over to the Bigdaddy infrastructure. The more data centers there are using Bigdaddy, the odds of you hitting a Bigdaddy data center in the normal rotation go up.
Q: Can I still give spam or quality feedback?
A: Absolutely. Follow the same instructions from my original Bigdaddy post. I’ll ask someone to review any new spam feedback, and I’ll request that someone look through the non-spam search quality feedback looking for issues as well.”
Many of us in the industry are wondering if the next visible Page Rank Tool Bar update will be delayed until Big Daddy is finished its’ roll-out. My educated guess is yes.
