Sunday, July 14, 2024

Search-blocking revisited


When Google delete posts by me that are hosted on their servers, I am reasonably philosophical about it. The major reason why I am so relaxed is that I back up everything I write on two servers not run by Google. But putting text online is only a first step. The next step is to make it possible for people to find it. And people researching a paticular topic will normally do a Google serch for it.

But what if Google does not index all sites that might be relevant to that search? The searcher will never find the non-indexed writings.

So why do Google not index eveything on the internet? One reason could be that they do not index sites that have few links leading to them. But that does not seem to be a major factor. Some sites with very few links leading to them do get indexed.

Another reason, and the one affecting me, is search-blocking. They do not index sites that they disagree with politically. They gloss that by saying that they do not index "misinformation"

My blogs were once heavily search-blocked but Google seem to have eased off some the blocking recently. Both "Political Correctness Watch" and "Greenie Watch" seem to be regularly indexed at the moment. So if some comment by me on either of those blogs is relevant to your search, Google will normally direct you to it.

A curious exception is posts on my "Australian Politics" blog. You will never find anything written there via a Google search. It seems to be thoroughly search-blocked. No idea why.

So unless the backups of my writings are indexed by Google, I might as well not have put them up. They will be largely non-findable. As it happens, they do sometimes seem to index my backup blogs and return relevant material on them in response to a search. That is however very sporadic. Normally they do NOT refer to material on my backup sites in response to a search.

So if you want to find my comment on something, you may or may not find it via a Google search. But is there another way of finding my comments on some subject? There is. I have a subject index to my comments on a site that covers all my blogs and is not hosted by Google:

or

I have been blogging since 2002 so there are a lot of comments there

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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