It seems that Google is forgetting the old web • Hacker News Board

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#121

Post by kickscondor » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

ashelmire wrote: post #116

kickscondor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that their algorithm has become weighted against blogs and personal websites. > Rumors spread that large link pages (for surfing) might be considered “link farms” (and yes on SEO sites they were but these things eventually trickle down to little personal site webmasters too) so these started to be phased out. Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to…

> SEO seems to have become a huge obstacle course that smaller websites can't play. Absolutely right. I recently started a blog, and was disheartened to learn that I have sign up for accounts with several search engines, conform to their standards and rules, give them a bunch of data... and still sometimes have mysterious issues with indexing with no real recourse. How much time and effort do I really want to spend t…

If you decide to start a blog again, please contact me - I will list you in my monthly "href hunt" - a raw dump of newly discovered sites. And I can point you to directories like personalsit.es that list blogs.

And, of course, consider having a blogroll of the sites you follow, which is all of our little way of contributing to the effort of finding each other. :)

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#122

Post by ashelmire » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

degenerate wrote: post #13

This author is in his own little bubble and doesn't understand the vast amount of blog-repost spam that google has to deal with. The way their algorithm most likely deals with this is a mixture of domain rank + tenure... how long has this copy of this article existed on this domain, and can we be sure this is the original copy? The author says the article was removed in 2006 (" [...] posts, were not accessible anymor…

Google has weird rules and inconsistent indexing. I recently published a two-part article on using graphql/apollo with react and rails; it never indexed the first part (the graphql / rails bit) but did index the second part (react and apollo). And in fact, searching for with "graphql rails react apollo" still doesn't show any results for this page on google despite ostensibly being indexed, but it shows up on duckduckgo. And looking over the results on google, only ~4 are actually relevant to the topic, so it's not like good content is being shown.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#123

Post by identity-haver » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:39 PM UTC

Liquix wrote: post #104

founderling wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an example: http://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/metallica__5.html No matter how you search for the content on Google, nothing comes up: https://www.google.com/search?q="Metallica+only+played+2+son... DuckDuckGo has it: https://duckduckgo.com/?q="Metallica+only+played+2+songs+fro... I checked the wayback machine and the content has constantly been on that url for over 10 years. This is the first example of an ol…

Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months? They've had to have been utilizing ML to 'improve' searches for some time now, but the quality of the results has decreased suddenly and inexplicably (for me).

About 2-3 months ago they basically nuked Youtube's search and recommendation. This was associated with some bad press about those features coming up with "harmful content" like unapproved radical politics & conspiracy theories. Now you basically see mostly curated front-page stuff plus some user stuff that had probably never come up in search before (e.g. a fairly common search term will come up with videos that are a decade old and only have 5k views). Maybe changes in Google search are related?

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#124

Post by ashelmire » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

kickscondor wrote: post #121

ashelmire wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SEO seems to have become a huge obstacle course that smaller websites can't play. Absolutely right. I recently started a blog, and was disheartened to learn that I have sign up for accounts with several search engines, conform to their standards and rules, give them a bunch of data... and still sometimes have mysterious issues with indexing with no real recourse. How much time and effort do I really want to spend t…

If you decide to start a blog again, please contact me - I will list you in my monthly "href hunt" - a raw dump of newly discovered sites. And I can point you to directories like personalsit.es that list blogs. And, of course, consider having a blogroll of the sites you follow, which is all of our little way of contributing to the effort of finding each other. :)

I plan on posting some more soon; work just got crazy for a bit. And that's a good idea, I should provide links to blogs I follow!

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#125

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

google is the dual of the old web, the old web was a jungle, that's why we wanted google, and now google is the urban regulation body

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#126

Post by kickscondor » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #117

typon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

holy crap, thanks for sharing Wiby! For the past two weeks I have been trying to find an old website by searching for "old mysterious site search engines" and "how to search deep parts of web" and "search engine tricks old site" and Google has not returned anything, even when I limited the time span to 2005-2006. I made the same search on Wilby and it returned search lores (maintained by the hacker Fravia) as the fir…

I'm surprised you had trouble finding Fravia. When I was writing my own Internet search guide ( https://www.gwern.net/Search ) recently, I had no trouble finding Fravia. Unfortunately, his guide is obsolete at this point and I didn't get much out of it.

Thankyou for the link to your search guide - this looks tremendous! Especially when searching for a specific answer to something. I wonder what you think about discovery when you are looking for something unknown within certain parameters... Like, say you are looking for an "interesting film blog" - a search term like that will often lead to pages of "Top 10 Movie Blogs" lists that are all largely clickbait or not that interesting. Do you have any advice for that kind of search? (Perhaps you cover this in the guide, but I missed it in my scan - I thought I would ask while you are here.)

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#127

Post by syphilis2 » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

It's not just the old web. I have a small website that does not show up in Google's results. When searching for the title of the site it's the 7th result on DDG yet does not appear on Google at all (Google runs out of results after 19 pages, which is also ridiculous considering the search is very common). When I search for the domain name (sans tld) on Google the associated YouTube page is the first result, also an unrelated Twitter account, and even a Reddit comment that links to my website (Reddit is a more effective search engine!). But my website is not listed. Finally, if I search for the full domain name the website shows up as the first result.

This has been a problem for three years, it's incredibly frustrating, and also demotivating.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#128

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#129

Post by gfo » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

I thought part of Google's ranking algorithm includes how often a site is updated? Perhaps there's some inclusion of how often an article is accessed which also determines a page's ranking?

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#130

Post by coliveira » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

One of the changes that made Google forget the old web is favoring https sites. This is a big benefit to new and commercial web sites because setting up SSL is still a burden for non-comercial publishers.