I’ve recently been watching Google closely. On the one hand, I’m tracking the Banana Republic Europe progress, on the other hand I’m checking the position of mReplay, a project which I’m involved in now.

Recently, google appears to be somewhat broken. The mReplay site keeps on going up to first hit, then only number 18, but referencing recent blog entries were in the top hits. This varies from reload to reload.

So it looks like while the page indices seem to be intact - all the new pages are there - but the pagerank data varies a lot; maybe the search page is load-balanced to different servers. The firefox google pagerank tool often displays n/a, too.

Similarly, for the “Banana Republic Europe” thing:
when you search for “Banana Republic” on google, you sometimes get many of the blog entries linking to the Council of the european union page, but not the referenced site. Sometimes it works.

(yes, the council of Europe is that stupid “CONSILIUM FW MX 2004 DW MX 2004 HTML” thing without a proper description…)

The Microsoft rip-off of google, MSN Search, has already been showing the link at hit number three. Now it’s #3 on google, too. So it’s kind of “MSN is easier to googlebomb than google” ;-)

Do we get the banana republic council up to place #1?

(BTW: do not confuse “Council of Europe” and “Concil of the European Union”)