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Serious question: what are some examples of great content virtually erased from the web by search engines?

Clubber 9y ago
Why don't you Google them? Edit: So someone missed the joke. If the Google removed an article, you couldn't Google it. Anyway, I finally found something after searching a bit. https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas-it-doesn-t-li-1798646437 https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas... the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results.
userbinator 9y ago
Great and obscure content --- that you'd most want a search engine to find, tends to be at most risk. For one example, I've noticed that finding information on obscure electronics part numbers has gotten much harder, and the search results are getting "diluted" with useless "fillter" results that don't even contain all the words you're searching for. Example queries I've had poor luck with recently: TVN_DELETEITEM recursive (count how many first-page results contain TVN_DELETEITEM) ITU T.800 (count how many are about T.800 and not E.800 or P.800 or X.800 or...)
- efreak 9y ago
  I've been annoyed at this for a while too, but I've noticed that if you put your search terms in quotes, that almost always fixes it. I have yet to see any existing search results disappear without the website they link to also disappearing. If only Google indexed the web archive...
- sundvor 9y ago
  Are you using the Verbatim search mode under Search tools, which replaces "All Results"? Makes a huge difference in getting rid of those suggestions etc.
- AnssiH 9y ago
  If you want exact word matches only, you need to use quotes: "TVN_DELETEITEM" "recursive" "ITU" "T.800"
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    Google still treats most punctuation as spaces within phrase searches. For example, the latter search would match a sentence/clause transition like "ITU-T: 800 items". There are enough results actually mentioning T.800 that you probably won't see that, but if it's a genuinely rare phrase you can end up with multiple pages completely full of useless results. For example, there was an article posted to HN a while back in which an interviewee mentioned "race liberals" as a political alignment. When I tried searching for this phrase, Google almost exclusively matched "race, liberals" and "race. Liberals".

Why don't you Google them? Edit: So someone missed the joke. If the Google removed an article, you couldn't Google it. Anyway, I finally found something after searching a bit. https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas-it-doesn-t-li-1798646437 https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas... the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results.

userbinator 9y ago

Great and obscure content --- that you'd most want a search engine to find, tends to be at most risk. For one example, I've noticed that finding information on obscure electronics part numbers has gotten much harder, and the search results are getting "diluted" with useless "fillter" results that don't even contain all the words you're searching for. Example queries I've had poor luck with recently: TVN_DELETEITEM recursive (count how many first-page results contain TVN_DELETEITEM) ITU T.800 (count how many are about T.800 and not E.800 or P.800 or X.800 or...)

efreak 9y ago
I've been annoyed at this for a while too, but I've noticed that if you put your search terms in quotes, that almost always fixes it. I have yet to see any existing search results disappear without the website they link to also disappearing. If only Google indexed the web archive...
sundvor 9y ago
Are you using the Verbatim search mode under Search tools, which replaces "All Results"? Makes a huge difference in getting rid of those suggestions etc.
AnssiH 9y ago
If you want exact word matches only, you need to use quotes: "TVN_DELETEITEM" "recursive" "ITU" "T.800"
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  Google still treats most punctuation as spaces within phrase searches. For example, the latter search would match a sentence/clause transition like "ITU-T: 800 items". There are enough results actually mentioning T.800 that you probably won't see that, but if it's a genuinely rare phrase you can end up with multiple pages completely full of useless results. For example, there was an article posted to HN a while back in which an interviewee mentioned "race liberals" as a political alignment. When I tried searching for this phrase, Google almost exclusively matched "race, liberals" and "race. Liberals".