Is Hilltop running in real-time?

Google is primarily running its service through 10,000 Pentium servers distributed across the web. That’s how they have built their server architecture. If we study the Hilltop algo, it is difficult to believe that such Pentium servers would have the processing power to locate ‘expert documents’ from thousands of topical documents, evaluate LocalScore of target pages from all these documents and pass the value to other components of Google algo, which then further process the results, on the fly, all in just about 0.07 seconds – the speed Google is famous for.

So how and when does Hilltop kick in?

We believe that Google is running a batch processing of popular search terms (so-called ‘money keywords list’) and stores the results ready to serve. Google has vast database of popular search terms in its database, collected from actual searches as well as keyword phrases used in AdWords program. Google has perhaps set a threshold value to the number of searches a search term needs to have before it qualifies to get into the Hilltop pool for batch processing. The Hilltop runs on the total pool of popular search terms, maybe once a month. Incremental smaller size batch processing may be done more frequently on search terms that gain popularity and qualify to get into the Hilltop pool. Results for the major pool may be synchronized with the 10,000 servers once a month and the smaller batches updated more frequently.

Search terms that do not qualify to kick in the Hilltop algo continue to show you the old Google ranking. Many SEO’s are happy and claim that their listings have not gone down for several client sites. They are perhaps checking with highly specific search terms that have not qualified to be on Hilltop radar yet.