81–90 of 552 posts
Not in those words, but they do claim to aspire to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”[1] which ought to include old web pages. They've gone to the effort of finding out of print books and digitizing them to make those searchable so it doesn't seem like a ten year old web page should be such a stretch.
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…
Hate to side with the big guys, but its a free service. Beggars can't be choosers. They probably dump indexes after a while for content older than x. Seems fairly reasonable actually.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 )
Honestly it feels like a good time to go back to MH handling my inbox but dropping a nice indexer like elasticsearch on the front.
E.g "from:torvalds and to:linux-ext4" to bring up all emails ever with those properties. Add some free text and/or "tag:foo" to narrow it down.
I've been using Google since 1998. I recently switched off Google Search and don't miss it at all. Google is in big trouble.
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…
Another really interesting thing I've noticed in gmail relating to search is that the number of matches for a given search is approximate, which makes perfect sense if they're using some kind of probabilistic data structure. However, when the correct number of matching emails does become known, because you have gone to the end, the result is not cached even client side. This gives a weird effect when combined with pagination: you go back a page, and the number of matches changes to the estimate again despite the fact the actual number is now known.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hate to side with the big guys, but its a free service. Beggars can't be choosers. They probably dump indexes after a while for content older than x. Seems fairly reasonable actually.
Then there's not much point to using Gmail. That was a huge part of the "never delete anything again" ploy.
Almost there...
Nobody can index the whole web. Even a single site in the form of Homepage of Joe Infinity You are on page ">Next Page can not be completely indexed. A search engine will crawl it to some depth based on many factors. Age might be one of them. There is no way to index 'everything' on the web.
That's really not relevant to this article. The author is not talking about crawling and indexing the entire web (although he mentions the "whole web" once, that's clearly not what he means). He is wondering why old pages -- pages that used to be in Google's index -- are no longer showing up in SERPs even when using appropriately-targeted long-tail queries.
I run a search engine. What I save and think matters can be expressed in a very definite dollar value.
Old pages in practical reality equals "whole web", since the index isn't getting trimmed, and exponential cost.