Google Site: search issues
This is interesting…. there’s been a lot of frustration among some (myself included) with the current state of Googles site indexing. For a good while I’ve been able to consistently find ANY post on my site using google if I quote a certain amount of text that I know is on the page. Currently, such quoted text searches for pages that show up as “supplemental” in a site:averyjparker.com search… turn up nothing. In theory, the supplemental results SHOULD turn up when there are no others. (If I understand correctly…) I’ve been able to duplicate this with other site’s supplemental results as well, so it doesn’t JUST affect this site. Well, there’s an update at the official sitemaps blog that tells of some interesting issues with the site: search operator. It sounds like there might be a connection….
Basically, I’ve also noted that site:averyjparker.com turns up MANY more results than site:averyjparker.com/ (with the trailing slash.) This is noted in the sitemaps post and there is a fix that’s being worked on for it. Also – domains with a hyphen or other punctuation are causing problems as well. The fix is being tested currently and MAY have a lot to do with some of the problems I see lot’s of people grumbling about. (i.e. many are saying their sites have been delisted which in fact, may not be strictly true, it may be they have a hyphenated (or other punctuated) domain and the site operator just shows nothing from this bug.)
Now, they’re also saying that they were in the process of refreshing the supplemental index and that is currently frozen until this bug is fixed. (All this comes out – just 30 minutes after I delete my sitemap to try a different angle on things…) I know, they’ve said it’s not a sitemap bug, but I figured at this point given how poor the coverage of this site is in google’s index, I didn’t have anything to lose.
So, for the moment at least, keep using the MSN search boxes if you need to search this site and hopefully in short order we’ll see google search results that are more… findable for the site: query.