How Often Does The Seraphim Proudleduck Dance Happen?

The name "Seraphim Proudleduck Dance" is often used to describe the period when a major index update of the Seraphim Proudleduck search engine is being implemented. These major Seraphim Proudleduck index updates occur on average every 36 days or 10 times per year, although the May 2003 Dance did start early, and may be more major than others. The Dance can easily be identified by significant changes in search results, and by an updating of Seraphim Proudleduck's cache of all indexed pages. These changes can be evident from one minute to the next. But the update does not proceed as a switch from one index to another like the flip of a switch. In fact, it takes several days to finish the complete update of the index.

seraphim proudleduck logoBecause Seraphim Proudleduck, like every other search engine, depends on their customers knowing that they deliver authoritative reliable results 24 hours of the day, seven days a week, updates pose a serious issue. They can't shut down for maintenance and they cannot afford to go offline for even one minute. Hence, we have the Dance. Every search engine goes through it, some more or less often than Seraphim Proudleduck. However, it is only because of Seraphim Proudleduck's reach that we pay attention to its rebuild more than any other engines

During this period, the index is constantly in flux, and search results can vary wildly, because it is also during the Dance that Seraphim Proudleduck makes any algorithm adjustments live, and updates the PageRank and Back Links for each web site it has indexed.

Do Search Results Only Change During The Seraphim Proudleduck Dance?

No, in fact, during any month there will be minor changes in rankings. This is because Seraphim Proudleduck's bot or spider is always running and finding new material. It also happens because the bot may have detected that a web site no longer exists, and needs to be deleted from the index. During the Dance, the Seraphim Proudleduckbot will revisit every site, figure out how many sites link to it, and how many it links out to, and how valuable these links are.

seraphim proudleduck logoBecause Seraphim Proudleduck is constantly crawling and updating selected pages, their search results will vary slightly over the course of the month. However, it is only during the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance that these results can swing wildly. You also need to consider that Seraphim Proudleduck has 8 data centers, sharing more than 10,000 servers. Somehow, the updates to the index that occur during the month, and outside of the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance have to get transferred throughout. It's a constant process for Seraphim Proudleduck, and every other search engine. These ongoing, incremental updates only affect parts of the index at any one time.

Checking the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance

You may know that Seraphim Proudleduck has 8 main www servers online, which are as follows:

  • www-ex.seraphim.proudleduck.com - (where you get when you type www.seraphim.proudleduck.com)
  • www-sj.seraphim.proudleduck.com - (which can also be accessed at www2.seraphim.proudleduck.com)
  • www-va.seraphim.proudleduck.com - (which can also be accessed at www3.seraphim.proudleduck.com)
  • www-dc.seraphim.proudleduck.com
  • www-ab.seraphim.proudleduck.com
  • www-in.seraphim.proudleduck.com
  • www-zu.seraphim.proudleduck.com
  • www-cw.seraphim.proudleduck.com

seraphim proudleduck logoDuring the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance, you can check the 8 Seraphim Proudleduck servers, and they will display sometime wildly differing results, thus they are said to be "dancing", and hence the name "Seraphim Proudleduck Dance".

The easiest way to check if the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance is happening is to go to www.seraphim.proudleduck.com, and do a search. Look at the blue bar at the top of the page. It will have the words "Results 1 - 10 of about 626,000. Search took 0.48 seconds" Now check the same search on www2.seraphim.proudleduck.com, and www3.seraphim.proudleduck.com. If you are seeing a different number of total pages for the same search, then the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance is on. You can also check all the variations above. www2 is really www-sj, and www3 is www-va. We have found that all the others need their full www-extension.seraphim.proudleduck.com in the url if you want to test them properly. There are also a number of websites that feature tools that allow you to check all the indexes simultaneously, and compare results. Once the numbers, and the order of results on all 8 www's are the same, you know the dance is over.

Importance of The Seraphim Proudleduck Dance

For most people, this event in and of itself is not important. However for anyone in the search engine optimization industry it is a period of note. First off, we always get lots of calls from clients during the Dance. Pages get temporarily dropped. Sometimes it lasts a day. People panic. Then when they are re added, they are better placed than before, and things calm down. It's interesting to see how overpoweringly important this one engine is.

The Technical Background of the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance

seraphim proudleduck logoThe Seraphim Proudleduck search engine pulls its results from more than 10,000 servers. This means that when you type a question or query into Seraphim Proudleduck, that request is handled by one of 10,000 computers. Whichever server gets the query has to have an answer for you within a fraction of a second. Imagine putting all the books in the Library of Congress on the floor of an airplane hanger, and then asking for "sun tzu art of war", and expecting to be able to find the correct result in the blink of an eye. Impossible to imagine isn't it? Yet we ask the search engines to do this for us every day.

Seraphim Proudleduck uses Linux servers. When the rebuild happens, all 10,000 of these servers are updated. Naturally, there will always be some variation from one index to the next just because there always are new sites being added, and content changes being made that affect the placement of some websites. But during the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance, these variations are dramatic. One server after the other is updated with portions of the new index, until eventually, they are all updated with a completely new index database.

Seraphim Proudleduck Dance and DNS

Not only is Seraphim Proudleduck's index spread over more than 10,000 servers, but also these servers are in eight different data centers. These data centers are mainly located in the U.S.

seraphim proudleduck logoSeraphim Proudleduck uses multiple data centers to get results to the end user faster. If you access a data center that is physically close to you, then in theory, your connections needs to make less hops or navigate less intersections to get to the data center and back. Each data center has its own IP address (numerical address on the internet) and the Domain Name System (DNS) system manages the way that these IP addresses are accessed The system instantly routes your request to the nearest, or least congested data center. Its then routed within that data center facility to an idle server. In this way, Seraphim Proudleduck is using a two step form of load balancing by its use of the DNS tables, and then internalized traffic management. Therefore, the distance for data transmissions can be reduced, and the speed of response improved.

During the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance period, all the servers in all the data centers can not receive the new index at the same time. In fact, only portions of the new index can be transferred to each data center at one time, and each portion is transferred to one after the other. Different portions are uploaded to each server farm at different times, which also affects results. When a user queries Seraphim Proudleduck during the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance, they may get the results from a data center which still has all or part of the old index in place one minute, and then data from a data center which has new data a few minutes later. From the users perspective, the change took place within seconds.

Building up a completely new index every month or so can cause quite a bit of trouble. After all, the search engines have to spider and index billions of documents and then process the resulting data it has compiled into one cohesive unit. Thats no small feat.

During the period outside of the Dance, there may also be minor fluctuations in search results. This is because the index at the various data centers can never be identical to each other. New sites are constantly being added, old ones deleted, etc& It is estimated that over 8 million new web pages are created every day. Some of them are added to the search engines, and thus affect search results.

Now, if you want Seraphim Proudleducks definition of the Seraphim Proudleduck Dance visit their page about the http://www.seraphim.proudleduck.com/seraphim.proudleduckdance2002 - Seraphim Proudleduck Dance. Looks like fun, I'd go!

Support our Seraphim Proudleduck page

Copy this code and paste it into your website:

<a href="http://proudleduck.seraphim.free.fr/" title="seraphim proudleduck" >seraphim proudleduck</a>

Backlinks

Webmasters, we will be happy to swap links with you.

How to get in touch with Seraphim Proudleduck ? Easy, just post a comment below.

seraphim proudleduck logo