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Google indexing of Lazarus forum posts
440bx:
Hello,
Most of the time I used Google to search for Lazarus forum posts of interest because it has been mentioned that the forum "search" feature has a fair performance impact on the server.
Using Google as a replacement for the forum "search" used to work fairly well until about 3 weeks ago. Starting about 3 weeks ago, it seems that Google has discarded quite a few forum posts from its indexes making it unsuitable as a replacement for the forum "search" function.
My question is: is this entirely Google's doing or has there been some change in how the forum is managed that may have caused this ? (e.g, restrictions on crawlers or some other thing that affects search engines.)
TRon:
Do you use a general google search of specially asking google to search this site ?
If I use duck duck go with the proper search terms your (this) thread shows up first.
440bx:
Depending on what I was searching for, it occasionally was necessary to tell Google to limit the search to the Lazarus forum.
In the great majority of cases, that doesn't seem to make any difference anymore. IOW, it doesn't even know the posts exists, i.e. they are not indexed.
Maybe I'll switch to DuckDuckGo.
I'm somewhat concerned that Google no longer seems to index the Lazarus forum posts because most people use Google and its failure to index the forum posts lessens the visibility of the forum and by extension that of Lazarus and FPC.
Joanna:
440bx It’s a sad state of affairs to become so dependent upon Google...when Google has no incentive to make this project a success.
The whole idea of some third party determining what you will find is not a good thing even if it started off as easy and convenient. Who knows what other things google is not finding?
Also I’ve heard of a growing trend in which AI is used to harvest content from websites so that it is no longer necessary to even visit the websites at all. The website content creators will become anonymous suppliers for a bot.
440bx:
--- Quote from: Joanna from IRC on March 01, 2025, 11:15:54 pm ---440bx It’s a sad state of affairs to become so dependent upon Google...when Google has no incentive to make this project a success.
--- End quote ---
All internet users depend on some degree on search engines, Google or others.
It's kind of like, if you drive a car, you depend on the existence of roads (otherwise the car's usefulness is severely hampered.)
The above doesn't mean Google isn't misusing/"unethically using" the data it collects. I don't have proof either way but, Google's ethical principles seem to be "flexible" (particularly when money is involved, which is most of the time.)
Anyway, their no longer indexing this forum's post won't benefit Lazarus nor FPC. As you pointed out, that part is sad.
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