May Day Update, Why Now and not Before?

In order to get a good idea of what we are discussing here make sure to read May Day, May Day, May Day – Google’s Long Tail Rankings Change. The question has been asked why did Google wait to change the rules on how long tail results are shown? The short answer is processing power. Think about it if you want to get results from a query that includes 3 to 7 keywords then what has to occur for that to happen? The scripts need to access the database looking for a combination of the keywords in question. Google gets roughly 34000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month, figures rounded). That equates to a lot of computer processing usage power that is needed.

Now that computers have a great deal more processing power Google has been able to update their data centers to be able to handle the additional processing power required for long tail queries. So along with better processing power I'm sure they have also streamlined their code with a write less, do more mentality.

In essence I think that Google's long tail algorithm now matches the algorithm that they had for smaller queries. Instead of having different sets of rules for one search over another they now can handle their queries with greater consistency.

Keep in mind these are our opinions and may not be necessarily what has occurred, but all in all it makes sense.