The End of Supplemental Results?
Posted: December 24th, 2007
Less than a week ago, Google’s Search Quality Team made a post in the Webmaster Central blog, that hints to the end of supplemental results along with the supplemental index. One of the main purposes for the supplemental index was to separate complex content (meant for esoteric queries), from pages with more “basic” information that’s catered towards the general public.
However, webmasters have often found that the supplemental index simply stored pages with duplicate content, were crawled less often, and even showed up less on the primary search engine result pages. Webmasters saw it to be more of a second-tier disciplinary index, rather than a scholarly index for expert search queries.
For better or for worse, Google has now increased crawl frequency and stopped labeling crawled pages with a particular index a few months ago. They claim that these changes will help users find more relevant websites with the sought-after information, by showing sites that would have otherwise been hidden in supplemental result pages.
But what’s to become of those pages with duplicate content? How exactly is GoogleBot able to speed up its crawl rate for the entire supplemental index, without compromising its crawl rate for the main index? These are some things we’ll need to keep an eye out for.
In the meantime: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! 
Merry christmas to you and happy holidays!