Today’s Twitter/Bing/Google news made me think about something that I’ve been finding increasingly frustrating and yet haven’t really seen discussed. All of this focus on the “real-time Web” is distracting the folks who are designing the search engines from one of the most vital services that they originally provided: cataloging, sorting and prioritizing the vast quantities of information on the Web.
It’s becoming more difficult to find some older information on Google anymore — outside of Google News — because Google’s algorithm has become so focused on showing us the newest, most “dynamic” information out there.
More than once, when searching for something that happened a while ago, my Google results show me what recently happened that was compared to that earlier event. I end up spending a not insignificant time sorting through results to find the information I was seeking. Same thing happens at times with Bing.
If this continues, I don’t see how this is a good development. Yes, indexing the “real-time Web” is important, but I really hope the efforts to know what’s happening on the Web right now don’t result in us “losing” the vast majority of the very good information out there written years ago about things that happened a few years or five years or 50 years ago.
I don’t know enough about this stuff to write much more, but I really do hope that the super-smart folks who think about this stuff are thinking about this part as well.
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Chris Geidner is the award-winning senior political editor at D.C.'s Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, The American Prospect, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications, as well as at his blog, Law Dork. In 2011, he received the Excellence in News Writing Award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his coverage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal. Prior to moving to D.C. in 2009, he served as an attorney on the senior staff at the Ohio Attorney General's Office and had earlier worked for a leading Columbus law firm. An extended biography can be found
Wow. OK. Thanks for posting this. I sometimes think I’m crazy or something because an item I know I found on teh googles a year or two ago seems unfindable now.
Maybe sometimes I don’t quite recall the search term string I used last time, but now I have a sense that in fact teh googles has changed and made that old thing harder to find.
I can go to bed tonight feeling a tad more sane. T-Y!
Thanks for raising this so clearly. I have exactly the same experience with Google searches. I often write posts trying to connect current events with matters no older than the 15 years the web has been ubiquitous, but have a very hard time finding material that should be easily accessible.
Additionally, Google seems to have crippled the indexing in Blogger, so “search this blog” no longer does a good job of finding even my own old blog posts!