The search engine ate my blog post

[wolfinthewood]

For much of today (13 August), my last post was at number three on the Google Blog Search for the search term 'google book settlement', on the 'Sorted by relevance' switch. I must admit, I contemplated this with satisfaction: and also a degree of respect for Google. I'd read on the web that they hand-pick results when it suits them. And I have little doubt their PR people are keeping a watchful eye on the Google Book Settlement debate. But I thought, here, after all, is a bit of proof that the Google search algorithm rules.

A short while ago, I revisited the search page, to see if there were any useful new posts. I wasn't very surprised to find that my post was no longer at number 3. After all, there are a lot of blog posts coming out all the time. Out of curiosity, I investigated to see how far it had dropped down the rankings. You know something? The rankings went down to 909. It wasn't there at all. Interesting, thought I. I searched under date, and went back to the point in time when it was spidered by the Googlebot. Couldn't find it. Then I started searching under unusual phrases in the text. No result. Finally, I searched under 'google book settlement wolfinthewood'. The only post that appeared was the one I made on 4 August. I searched under 'wolfinthewood'. The most recent post was the one on 4 August.

My 12 August post, with the link to my paper The Google Book Settlement and European Authors, has completely vanished from the Google Blog Search index.

In the space of a few hours.

Now, what would you make of that?

Fell down some crack in the code, do you think? Or could it possibly be that Google are hand-picking search results in their own self interest?

Surely they wouldn't do anything so evil -- and so destructive of public trust in them?

Comments

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

What happens if you do the same search using another search engine?

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

No one else has a blog search engine that is as comprehensive, and indexes as rapidly, as the Google Blog search. Neither Yahoo nor Bing (aka Microsoft Live Search) has a blog search option, so far as I know. Technorati, for some reason, never picked up The Leaves that Hung But Never Grew, though I submitted it on their form several times. In the end, I stopped bothering. I'd given up using them myself by that time - too many spam results. (But I think they may have a better spam filter now.) I never bothered to submit The Leaves that Hung to other blog search engines. After all, before the last few weeks, it was only a bit of fun.