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Google Memory Loss

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Re: Google Memory Loss

#31
post #2

It seems possible these particular articles fell out of Google's index for some other reason than they are not indexing "old" stuff. That's kind of a big leap to make without many more examples.

Q: What's the difference between amnesia and Alzheimer's?

A: I don't remember.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#32
I just noticed this also, earlier today. I have a blog entry titled "Highest airports in California" that I attempted to find using Google. Even with the double quotes, and restricting the search to the correct site, it doesn't seem to come up in search results.

The site's robots.txt seems permissive enough. What's up?

link: https://nibot.livejournal.com/1075122.html

Re: Google Memory Loss

#33
post #16

De-indexing old stuff might not be a good idea, but I'm increasingly running into the problem of google (and DDG) returning old and outdated results, I wish they would put more weight on recent articles, or at least add the option too. The time filtering options just aren't enough.

Why is the drop down in tools not enough?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intersections are another thing that Google search doesn't do properly anymore. If I search for something like lkasdfjer samsung galaxy s8 it just gives me matches for samsung galaxy s8 and ignores the first word. When I do searches like this, I do it for a reason and don't want matches that lack some of the search terms.

I've found if I put the keyword in double-quotes then it makes the keyword required in the search

Testing your hypothesis:

https://imgur.com/a/yvo3y

Re: Google Memory Loss

#35
post #2

It seems possible these particular articles fell out of Google's index for some other reason than they are not indexing "old" stuff. That's kind of a big leap to make without many more examples.

There's not a single Google index; rather, it spans multiple tiers. Perhaps those pages fell through the cracks, in the figurative sense -- perhaps there is not enough capacity in the tier(s) they are in and the cutoff is too aggressive. There are internal tools to debug this, but of course nobody that has access to them will report here.

Uh, five minutes after I first tried, now the review is the first hit for [lou reed "rock n roll animal" tim bray] and a bunch of variations. Enough people searching for it might have changed the state of the system.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#36
post #17

I've convinced myself that this happens in gmail / hangouts history search too. It'll very confidently tell you that here are the only six results for your search term going back to the beginning of time, but if you go and manually dig up something that you know is there from ten years ago, then all of a sudden there are seven results the next time you search for the same term. I haven't done this methodically, and I…

Microsoft does this too. I have a massive mailbox going back 15 years and O365 doesn’t handle it well with full text search... you need to scope it to a person.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#37
post #17

I've convinced myself that this happens in gmail / hangouts history search too. It'll very confidently tell you that here are the only six results for your search term going back to the beginning of time, but if you go and manually dig up something that you know is there from ten years ago, then all of a sudden there are seven results the next time you search for the same term. I haven't done this methodically, and I…

100% Agreed. Gmail doesn't seem to want to find stuff that is there.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#38
post #17

I've convinced myself that this happens in gmail / hangouts history search too. It'll very confidently tell you that here are the only six results for your search term going back to the beginning of time, but if you go and manually dig up something that you know is there from ten years ago, then all of a sudden there are seven results the next time you search for the same term. I haven't done this methodically, and I…

Sounds like they don't index the full corpus

Or there is a time bound or other resource bound that they are willing to expend under the current circumstances ( are you a free user? Paid user? Internal user? Mobile? Web? Etc )
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