Last night at SMX West during the Meet The Search Engines panel, Google’s Gary Illyes was supposedly quoted as saying that Panda, the Google algorithm, is constantly running, instantly.

Rae posted on Twitter, “@methode (who is Gary Illyes of Google) says panda happens “pretty much instantly”:

Eric Wu, who was there, added that he said only after the pages are processed:

But what does processed mean? After they are crawled by Google?

We do know that Panda is a rolling update now but it has been over four months since a Panda update, at least based on my records. By update I mean, Panda sites seeing any ranking benefit or decline in over four months.

So it is possible that Panda is no longer a rolling update, no longer running instantly or so. Truth is, I am confused by the quote, I was not there, I am not sure if this is what Gary meant exactly or if it was misinterpreted. I am trying to get more details for a bigger story, probably at Search Engine Land.

Forum discussion at Twitter.