Google-based search seems to miss things

By GW Swicord on May 20, 2009 5:08:27 PM from

I wanted to hunt up the old wilderness thread for a reference link, and I knew that Geoff the Slug was mentioned in it, so I used the local search box and entered "Geoff the Slug" (quotes included). The search only returned two hits, both for NTJedi's terrain types thread.

But when I ran the search from Google proper and added the site:forums.elementalgame.com delimiter, I got four hits for four different threads, including the one I wanted to find.

That seems a little broken to me, but I'm just an end user...

+159 Karma | 7 Replies

Unfortunately we don't have much control over what Google displays on their search. Perhaps their site search is more thorough, or it could have just been a fluke.

Either way, we are looking into bringing back direct-database search, so we don't have to go through Google to search. This may take some time though.

Bara

After looking at a few variations on this 'bug,' I'm thinking maybe there is some hidden date parameter on the forum-based Google search?

New example: Local search for "independent kingdoms" yields only 3 hits, one of which is a bizarre link to page 2 of the Elemental Ideas topic page, which does not include the Independent Kingdoms thread I was looking for. Direct search at Google with the site: parameter yields 5 hits, including the one I wanted and the weird hit for the topic area with no mention of the search string.

The only obvious difference to me in the two thread hits that I saw at Google but not here in the forums is that both the target threads were created last year.

Bara, apologies for appearing to ignore you, but I could swear I didn't see your reply until I posted my own just now.

I can easily imagine Google shorting a customer like this, if for no other reason than to drive traffic back to their main search page. I'm glad to hear y'all are considering restoring your own search functions, and I understand that there are plenty of higher priorites for forum coding.

I'm curious, though. Would it be poor form for the site UI to call out this limitation? Some of the best stuff in GC2 for new players is in quite old threads.

I could potentially put a little remark in the search page somewhere stating that older threads may not appear in the search unless searched directly from Google. I'll see what others think.

Bara

I think that google has to index the page before it can be search. I have created webpages of my own, and when I tried to search thru them using google, nothing came up, so I asked google to index the pages, after a few days, i searched again and it came up

Quoting Mooster,

reply 5

That's not the problem here. The forums are well-indexed as far as I can tell via searches direct from the Google site. It's just the local fueled-by-Google search that yields time-limited results of some sort, almost the reverse of too-new-to-have-been-crawled. It was rather old posts I wanted to find that made me have to go offsite to get good hits.

Been broken since they began censoring links a number of years back. I remember the Google of old... used to find things ...

I mean you still can... just not without a whole lot of crap... I miss my pre-IPO google

-Gonzo

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

Google-based search seems to miss things