Last summer I talked to GoogleGuy for a bit (after he got out of the dunking tank) and someone asked him this question. He basically said that it is a continually updating number internally pretty much every time they discover a link and that the external thing is just meant as a very generalized indicator on one day some time in the past. The overhead for them to publicly give us the real-time numbers would be staggering in CPU cycles, so we get a snapshot from one day a while back as a minor indicator how that site is doing in their link popularity.

If anyone has heard a Google employee say the opposite, I'd like to hear it. I can't fathom this working any other way... anything else leaves really old data determining results and thereby making the search engine pretty useless.

Brian.

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