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Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

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Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#12

It really angers me that, despite the fact that it may be essentially perfectly what I'm looking for, if it was published long ago, Google may refuse to find it. Something like a news search engine would definitely be better off prioritising the new results, but for something more general-purpose, it's an absolutely horrible choice. I know this may be a bit of an edge-case, but I frequently search for service informa…

Google got where it was by being the best at finding what you wanted. I remember those days.

Google has a hard time getting me what I want these days, and sites I do find do things to get found that make me like content a lot less (that's you, inane story on top of every recipe required to get ranked)

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#13
Why does Google deeply index those useless telephone directory sites? Try searching for the impossible U.S. phone number "307-139-2345" and you'll see a bunch of "who called me?" or "reverse phone number lookup" sites. Virtually all of those sites are complete garbage. They make no attempt to collect numbers from telephone directories or from the web. They won't identify a number as being the main phone number for Disneyland for example.

It's odd that so many of those sites exist, that Google indexes them so deeply, and that they show up in searches so prominently. It's obvious that they are spam, scams, or worthless, but those same sites have been appearing prominently for years.

I agree with the author. My experience has also been that Google heavily prioritizes very large and frequently-updated sites over small static information-rich personal sites. I think it's a big flaw that needs to be fixed or for someone else to do better.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#14
post #13

Why does Google deeply index those useless telephone directory sites? Try searching for the impossible U.S. phone number "307-139-2345" and you'll see a bunch of "who called me?" or "reverse phone number lookup" sites. Virtually all of those sites are complete garbage. They make no attempt to collect numbers from telephone directories or from the web. They won't identify a number as being the main phone number for Di…

I think there is an easy heuristic, bias against ads.

Google can’t do this. Original sources very likely don’t have ads, scrapes will have tons. But good results are good results. Big g has done an admirable job. They can’t exploit the best metric for quality.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#15

It really angers me that, despite the fact that it may be essentially perfectly what I'm looking for, if it was published long ago, Google may refuse to find it. Something like a news search engine would definitely be better off prioritising the new results, but for something more general-purpose, it's an absolutely horrible choice. I know this may be a bit of an edge-case, but I frequently search for service informa…

Google got where it was by being the best at finding what you wanted. I remember those days. Google has a hard time getting me what I want these days, and sites I do find do things to get found that make me like content a lot less (that's you, inane story on top of every recipe required to get ranked)

I find this. It has a bias towards large commercial news/ecommerce sites/daily fresh content. Great for the majority of browsers but for programming and other hobbies of mine the real content I want are in niche small blogs/forums that don’t get up ranked liked they used to so drop off the index.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google got where it was by being the best at finding what you wanted. I remember those days. Google has a hard time getting me what I want these days, and sites I do find do things to get found that make me like content a lot less (that's you, inane story on top of every recipe required to get ranked)

I find this. It has a bias towards large commercial news/ecommerce sites/daily fresh content. Great for the majority of browsers but for programming and other hobbies of mine the real content I want are in niche small blogs/forums that don’t get up ranked liked they used to so drop off the index.

Consider, though, that a lot of those big sites are there because of various tricks to push theselves up in ranking because they have money that the small, niche sites don’t.

The little guys don’t really have a chance, unless you have a search engine specifically biased toward them.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#17
post #13

Why does Google deeply index those useless telephone directory sites? Try searching for the impossible U.S. phone number "307-139-2345" and you'll see a bunch of "who called me?" or "reverse phone number lookup" sites. Virtually all of those sites are complete garbage. They make no attempt to collect numbers from telephone directories or from the web. They won't identify a number as being the main phone number for Di…

I've been wondering the same. I think most people google numbers that called, so it has to be a lucrative business. There are a couple sites that are for user reports that are actually nice, but the vast majority seem to be scammy and irrelevant (not even the right number), or completely fake information. Once I googled a number that returned a lot of results for a first initial, last name and address. It was my own mother's number of the last few years that I kept forgetting to save. The results were obviously either fake or many many years outdated

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#18

It really angers me that, despite the fact that it may be essentially perfectly what I'm looking for, if it was published long ago, Google may refuse to find it. Something like a news search engine would definitely be better off prioritising the new results, but for something more general-purpose, it's an absolutely horrible choice. I know this may be a bit of an edge-case, but I frequently search for service informa…

Google got where it was by being the best at finding what you wanted. I remember those days. Google has a hard time getting me what I want these days, and sites I do find do things to get found that make me like content a lot less (that's you, inane story on top of every recipe required to get ranked)

[deleted]

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#20
post #14
post #13

Why does Google deeply index those useless telephone directory sites? Try searching for the impossible U.S. phone number "307-139-2345" and you'll see a bunch of "who called me?" or "reverse phone number lookup" sites. Virtually all of those sites are complete garbage. They make no attempt to collect numbers from telephone directories or from the web. They won't identify a number as being the main phone number for Di…

I think there is an easy heuristic, bias against ads. Google can’t do this. Original sources very likely don’t have ads, scrapes will have tons. But good results are good results. Big g has done an admirable job. They can’t exploit the best metric for quality.

No they don't do an admirable job if they send you to scraped rather than original content. They're ruining the web. While Google still has fantastic, one-of-a-kind services such as Translate, Search isn't one of them anymore, and we should stop cheering at it and relying on it.
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