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Google Memory Loss

tbray.org

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Re: Google Memory Loss

#11

Post by robotmlg »

bombita wrote: post #5

https://www.google.com/search?q="we+were+watching+the+Democr... I can find the article this person is referring just by looking at a string of it. So the article _is_ indexed. Not sure what he is referring to.

That result is just the blog's page for November 2008, not the article page itself. So while that page _does_ have the article text on it, it is not the article itself.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#13

Post by refulgentis »

Chris911 wrote: post #8
bombita wrote: post #5

https://www.google.com/search?q="we+were+watching+the+Democr... I can find the article this person is referring just by looking at a string of it. So the article _is_ indexed. Not sure what he is referring to.

I don't see any links to https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/03/13/Rock-n-Ro... in those search results.

And rightly so, the quote is from Brent Simmons' article.

However, you're right anyways: you can't reach Tim's article by searching quotes.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#14

Post by S_A_P »

bombita wrote: post #5

https://www.google.com/search?q="we+were+watching+the+Democr... I can find the article this person is referring just by looking at a string of it. So the article _is_ indexed. Not sure what he is referring to.

Its possible that by linking to his article he triggered a re-indexing of it? I wont pretend to know how google works but seems plausible to me.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#15

Post by mortehu »

Veedrac wrote: post #10
bombita wrote: post #5

https://www.google.com/search?q="we+were+watching+the+Democr... I can find the article this person is referring just by looking at a string of it. So the article _is_ indexed. Not sure what he is referring to.

That only gives me http://inessential.com/2008/11/ , not http://inessential.com/2008/11/04/that_new_sound .

The second link is a partial duplicate of the first link; it contains nothing not contained in the first link. Maybe that's why?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#16

Post by flukus »

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old stuff might not be a good idea, but I'm increasingly running into the problem of google (and DDG) returning old and outdated results, I wish they would put more weight on recent articles, or at least add the option too.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.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#17

Post by ohazi »

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 can't prove that this is happening, but it's infuriating nonetheless.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#18

Post by egg_head12 »

anfilt wrote: post #7

I would not be surprised if google still has the data. Not sure how google handles things internally. However, google needs to pull up the results fast. So they might have 4 billion results with the word "water" in it. They only make tiny portion of that available. So if I type the words "Hot water" google it looks at the subset of pages with words "Hot" and the word "Water" So google must pull the pages that have bo…

Seems reasonable when you put that way, but as you said you are unsure how google handles their indexes. I doubt we will ever will unless your signature is on a NDA.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#20

Post by incompatible »

anfilt wrote: post #7

I would not be surprised if google still has the data. Not sure how google handles things internally. However, google needs to pull up the results fast. So they might have 4 billion results with the word "water" in it. They only make tiny portion of that available. So if I type the words "Hot water" google it looks at the subset of pages with words "Hot" and the word "Water" So google must pull the pages that have bo…

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.
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