Comments on: Google Blog Search Changes How It Indexes Posts

By: Google Still Working On Making Blog Search More Relevant

Google Still Working On Making Blog Search More Relevant — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:20:49 +0000

[...] since November 2008 the link operator in blog search failed for me. Then it got worse when they tried fixing it and got somewhat better with their second attempt towards the end of [...]

By: Marah Marie

Marah Marie — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:35:33 +0000

The problem now is Blog Search indexes some site’s content better than Web search does but Google doesn’t cache it. So you find some juicy (but deleted) blog post in Blog Search, can’t access any cache for it, search for it on the Web, and still can’t find the cache because Web search never indexed it.

Why use Blog Search to index more thoroughly than Web search does if it doesn’t cache?

I’m seeing the opposite problem too, where the Web index for some sites is better than the Blog index for them is – Google just seems to be at loose ends with how best to organize information – and since that is what part of their business is about (most of it is about advertising, but still) you’d think they’d want to get their acts together on this.

Caveat: I’m speaking purely from a semantic viewpoint on this – technically I’m against caching or even web crawling by any search engine unless the owner of the content opts in – but that’s another post that I’m not replying to at the moment.

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:48:03 +0000

quadszilla, if there’s content that you don’t want to be indexed, robots.txt is great for that.

By: quadszilla

quadszilla — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:04:06 +0000

I for one prefer full feeds – it’s better for the users, but clearly Google is not respecting the choices of the publishers.

But that’s just par for the course for Google (Google Books, Youtube . . . etc)

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:30:40 +0000

I’ve experienced the problem that you’ve described (with sidebar content causing issues, etc). In the upgrade to Reputation Monitor that we’re launching soon, we’ve added a lot of behind-the-scenes processing to judge the relevance of a particular page to you/your search term – this should remove these false-positives that Google now returns.

And yes – interesting search results; Patrick does reap the benefits of being crawled about every two minutes.

By: Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:20:25 +0000

Yea, noticed this behavior about a month ago. Good you have confirmation. Posted my details over at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018624.html