4 ms·

> Blogs ... show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query. No, they don't. This comes down to two main changes in how Google operates: 1)

> Blogs ... show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query. No, they don't. This comes down to two main changes in how Google operates: 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results, and 2) Google has chosen to progressively delist old content, even if many blog posts from the early millennium remain just as relevant today because no one has posted at length on the subject in the years since. Thus, people are unable to find a great deal of content through Google even if they search for the exact strings which appear in those posts. You might see some blogs in search results, but they are a miniscule representation of the whole blog ecosystem.

crazygringo 6y ago
Not that I don't believe you, but that just hasn't been my experience with Google at all, and I use it extensively for research tracking down fairly obscure sources with presumably close-to-zero traffic by putting in quoted sentence fragments. Do you have an example of a website that is linked to from other sites (so Google can find it) where a quoted search for a unique sentence fragment from it doesn't list it as a result? I've just never heard authoritatively of Google removing old content from results, especially since it seems antithetical to the company's mission of organizing all the world's information. And seeing how so much of the value of search (and purchasing and content and so much else) is in the "long tail", it seems like it would be an extremely counterproductive strategy.
- xythobuz 6y ago
  This blog post [1] has at least two anecdotal examples. Also see the corresponding HN discussion [2]. [1]: http://stop.zona-m.net/2018/01/indeed-it-seems-that-google-is-forgetting-the-old-web/ http://stop.zona-m.net/2018/01/indeed-it-seems-that-google-i... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Ah yes I remember that one, thanks for finding that. Giving the article and comments a quick-rebrowse, it honestly seems extremely circumstantial -- that they're mostly explainable due to content moving, URL's without any links pointing to them, etc. -- generally stuff that can be identified and fixed in Search Console for your site. It hardly looks like any confirmable trend or policy, not even remotely. Just Google doing its best to rank the most useful search results with the heuristics it has, but not excluding anything it's able to find. And jumping to the conclusion that any de-ranking has to do with age is pure speculation. So unfortunately I just don't see any real evidence to support the up-comment assertion that Google delists content due to its age. And again, it flies in the face of its business model which is to return useful results so it can show advertising next to them. There's no plausible business motive here.
- jiofih 6y ago
  I don’t have a source right now, but what the previous poster said is precisely true. The span of time google will actually search for has been consistently shrinking. I had a very frustrating one not long ago, where I bookmarked a post and could not for the love of god find it again using google, even with an exact quote that produced 0 results. That’s what led me onto researching about how bad the situation is and reaching similar conclusions. You’ll also notice that you can’t really navigate to “page 13” of a google search anymore. Despite “xx million results”, they only display the top hundreds or so. Blogs and forums are so deranged that you have to either know the domain and use that on the search, or use multiple keywords like “forum” or something specific to surface them. The only blogs you’ll ever see naturally surfacing are hosted in Medium, WP and “noticed” by bots because they were linked from reddit, Pinterest or some other aggregator.
  - rubatuga 6y ago
    I'm not so sure, my blog shows up as the first result for the following terms in Google, while it doesn't even show up for the first few pages in DuckDuckGo. It seems to suggest that Google prioritizes blogs. [0]: https://google.com/search?q=ghost+blog+latex https://google.com/search?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://google.com/search?q=disable+networkd https://google.com/search?q=disable+networkd [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ghost+blog+latex https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=disable+systemd+networkd https://duckduckgo.com/?q=disable+systemd+networkd
    - jiofih 6y ago
      Your post is from 2018, not very old and on a very niche topic. Look for the “google is forgetting the old web” article.
- hispanic 6y ago
  Google 100% removes viable entries from their index. I have a blog and I can see via the Google Search Console [1] that several of my posts are marked as "Crawled - currently not indexed". Meaning, Google was led to the page via my sitemap.xml or some other source, crawled it, and then chose not to include it in their search index. It's very discouraging, particularly when it happens to posts that, personally, I'm quite fond of [2]. If it matters, Google has recorded 1,085 clicks from their search results to my blog, in general, over the course of the past 3 months. [1] https://search.google.com/u/2/search-console/ https://search.google.com/u/2/search-console/ [2] https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-book-airbnbs https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-boo... https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/i-am-retired-kinda https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/i-am-retired-kinda
tiborsaas 6y ago
> 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results They do. Search for "javascript vscode" and "javascript -vscode" completely different results.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Today Google kinda, sorta respects minus signs. You are right that you can often get a different set of results by including one. However, Google does not strictly interpret those operators anymore, which you can verify for yourself by trying to search for exact strings in pages from a range of times.
- TACIXAT 6y ago
  That is an odd example. You are comparing the search for js with the search of js vscode. Everyday I run into a Google hell. Tonight I was trying to find info on how Github uses let's encrypt for https on custom domains. The only thing that comes up are questions about how to enable it. I switched my default search to duckduckgo. I always thought DDG would never catch Google, but never realized Google would make their results so useless as to make DDG competitive. (Sorry DDG, I love you.)
  - tiborsaas 6y ago
    No, I wanted to get results which doesn't mention vscode and it worked just fine. Try "pandas" and "pandas -python" If on some rare occasions I don't find what I want in Google, I just assume either my mental model is broken or the topic doesn't exists. I also try other engines in same cases, but when I'm that lost it doesn't help, I change something else.
- thomasahle 6y ago
  Yesterday I was trying to find code examples using the d3 join() and each() functions. I tried searching "join(" "each(", but apparently Google completely removes parenthesis, even when inside quotes. Github's code search does the same thing :-(

crazygringo 6y ago

Not that I don't believe you, but that just hasn't been my experience with Google at all, and I use it extensively for research tracking down fairly obscure sources with presumably close-to-zero traffic by putting in quoted sentence fragments. Do you have an example of a website that is linked to from other sites (so Google can find it) where a quoted search for a unique sentence fragment from it doesn't list it as a result? I've just never heard authoritatively of Google removing old content from results, especially since it seems antithetical to the company's mission of organizing all the world's information. And seeing how so much of the value of search (and purchasing and content and so much else) is in the "long tail", it seems like it would be an extremely counterproductive strategy.

xythobuz 6y ago
This blog post [1] has at least two anecdotal examples. Also see the corresponding HN discussion [2]. [1]: http://stop.zona-m.net/2018/01/indeed-it-seems-that-google-is-forgetting-the-old-web/ http://stop.zona-m.net/2018/01/indeed-it-seems-that-google-i... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Ah yes I remember that one, thanks for finding that. Giving the article and comments a quick-rebrowse, it honestly seems extremely circumstantial -- that they're mostly explainable due to content moving, URL's without any links pointing to them, etc. -- generally stuff that can be identified and fixed in Search Console for your site. It hardly looks like any confirmable trend or policy, not even remotely. Just Google doing its best to rank the most useful search results with the heuristics it has, but not excluding anything it's able to find. And jumping to the conclusion that any de-ranking has to do with age is pure speculation. So unfortunately I just don't see any real evidence to support the up-comment assertion that Google delists content due to its age. And again, it flies in the face of its business model which is to return useful results so it can show advertising next to them. There's no plausible business motive here.
jiofih 6y ago
I don’t have a source right now, but what the previous poster said is precisely true. The span of time google will actually search for has been consistently shrinking. I had a very frustrating one not long ago, where I bookmarked a post and could not for the love of god find it again using google, even with an exact quote that produced 0 results. That’s what led me onto researching about how bad the situation is and reaching similar conclusions. You’ll also notice that you can’t really navigate to “page 13” of a google search anymore. Despite “xx million results”, they only display the top hundreds or so. Blogs and forums are so deranged that you have to either know the domain and use that on the search, or use multiple keywords like “forum” or something specific to surface them. The only blogs you’ll ever see naturally surfacing are hosted in Medium, WP and “noticed” by bots because they were linked from reddit, Pinterest or some other aggregator.
- rubatuga 6y ago
  I'm not so sure, my blog shows up as the first result for the following terms in Google, while it doesn't even show up for the first few pages in DuckDuckGo. It seems to suggest that Google prioritizes blogs. [0]: https://google.com/search?q=ghost+blog+latex https://google.com/search?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://google.com/search?q=disable+networkd https://google.com/search?q=disable+networkd [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ghost+blog+latex https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=disable+systemd+networkd https://duckduckgo.com/?q=disable+systemd+networkd
  - jiofih 6y ago
    Your post is from 2018, not very old and on a very niche topic. Look for the “google is forgetting the old web” article.
hispanic 6y ago
Google 100% removes viable entries from their index. I have a blog and I can see via the Google Search Console [1] that several of my posts are marked as "Crawled - currently not indexed". Meaning, Google was led to the page via my sitemap.xml or some other source, crawled it, and then chose not to include it in their search index. It's very discouraging, particularly when it happens to posts that, personally, I'm quite fond of [2]. If it matters, Google has recorded 1,085 clicks from their search results to my blog, in general, over the course of the past 3 months. [1] https://search.google.com/u/2/search-console/ https://search.google.com/u/2/search-console/ [2] https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-book-airbnbs https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-boo... https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/i-am-retired-kinda https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/i-am-retired-kinda

tiborsaas 6y ago

> 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results They do. Search for "javascript vscode" and "javascript -vscode" completely different results.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Today Google kinda, sorta respects minus signs. You are right that you can often get a different set of results by including one. However, Google does not strictly interpret those operators anymore, which you can verify for yourself by trying to search for exact strings in pages from a range of times.
TACIXAT 6y ago
That is an odd example. You are comparing the search for js with the search of js vscode. Everyday I run into a Google hell. Tonight I was trying to find info on how Github uses let's encrypt for https on custom domains. The only thing that comes up are questions about how to enable it. I switched my default search to duckduckgo. I always thought DDG would never catch Google, but never realized Google would make their results so useless as to make DDG competitive. (Sorry DDG, I love you.)
- tiborsaas 6y ago
  No, I wanted to get results which doesn't mention vscode and it worked just fine. Try "pandas" and "pandas -python" If on some rare occasions I don't find what I want in Google, I just assume either my mental model is broken or the topic doesn't exists. I also try other engines in same cases, but when I'm that lost it doesn't help, I change something else.
thomasahle 6y ago
Yesterday I was trying to find code examples using the d3 join() and each() functions. I tried searching "join(" "each(", but apparently Google completely removes parenthesis, even when inside quotes. Github's code search does the same thing :-(