Falling between the cracks.
August 5, 2009 1:06 PM

Why does this google search not find this AskMe thread? Or what can I do to my search terms to make this search work?

Usually when I'm looking for a comment I've made I do a site search for a couple key terms and add my username to narrow the scope. However the above search does not find my comment even though both of the key terms are present in it. Choosing show omitted results also doesn't return that thread.

In askme rather than meta as I think my problem is with google
posted by Mitheral to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
It looks like for some reason that thread isn't indexed. Searching for the title directly only returns pages where the thread is linked, but never the thread itself.
posted by Phire at 1:10 PM on August 5, 2009


Yeah, googling inurl:ask.metafilter.com/84393/outletfilter doesn't return any results, so it looks like this thread didn't make it into Google's database for whatever reason. Odd, but not unheard-of.
posted by paulg at 1:16 PM on August 5, 2009


I remember reading a bunch of MetaTalk threads over the years about Yahoo vs. Google for site search. For a while at least, Yahoo seemed to return better results than Google for AskMe's site search, so that's when I started using Yahoo for MeFi-related searches. It's still a habit, although I will use Google if Yahoo isn't helpful. I do use Google's engine first for pretty much all non-MeFi web searches.

Here's the same search for your terms but using Yahoo's engine. The "outletfilter!" thread comes up first for me.

Unfortunately, it looks like using the Yahoo engine for site search won't be an option in the future since it probably isn't long for this world. Out of curiosity, I just tried the same terms using Bing and the "outletfilter!" thread didn't turn up as a result. In fact Bing gave only 17 results, most of them being monthly archive index pages.
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 7:34 PM on August 5, 2009


Well at least it's not me though it's disturbing in some way that the question is missing from google's index. Interestingly it still doesn't show up even though I've added two more links to the page. I wonder if there is something about the page that is considered spammy.
posted by Mitheral at 1:44 AM on August 6, 2009


Now it is the top result. Very weird.
posted by Mitheral at 11:32 AM on November 4, 2009


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