Better Google searching for MeFi?

September 23, 2007 12:32 PM

Has Google changed/improved the way it indexes Metafilter? When looking up answers for some recent AskMe questions, I've been surprised to see the questions themselves show up in Google's search results.

For instance: this question on filtering by contacts in Gmail. Here's a google search that lists it as #2.

posted by O9scar to MetaFilter-Related at 12:32 PM (12 comments total)

Google has been indexing RSS feeds in close to real time for a few months now. As a result, blogs and posts from other regularly-updated websites are appearing quickly, sometimes within minutes.
posted by Partial Law at 12:58 PM on September 23, 2007

I don't know if anything has changed particularly—askme questions have showed up well-ranked in search results for me for a long time now, depending on the search terms.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:02 PM on September 23, 2007

For an example of another high-traffic site that's getting indexed quickly, see this Slashdot comment, advising readers to consider a "4 wire unloaded circuit." The first response, posted less than half an hour later, points out that Googling that phrase returns a single result: that same Slashdot comment.
posted by Partial Law at 1:09 PM on September 23, 2007

It's pretty much dumb luck.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:39 PM on September 23, 2007

The admins made an evil pact with Google. Your questions are now indexed and listed on the google homepage BEFORE you think of them. Uh oh, I've said to much! run!
posted by blue_beetle at 2:01 PM on September 23, 2007

Do you think inserting the title in the address helped with search engines? It used to be that a question on AskMe had an adress of

http://ask.metafilter.com/72206/

but now it's

http://ask.metafilter.com/72206/Creating-a-GMail-filter-based-on-contacts

Which Google seems to care about, they even bold the words in the address that match your search strings.
posted by ALongDecember at 2:10 PM on September 23, 2007

Google personalizes search results based on what you've searched for before, I believe. I do plenty of "site:metafilter.com ..." searches, so I think that increases their rank in general results for me.
posted by gsteff at 2:19 PM on September 23, 2007

(if you have an account, are signed in, and have search history enabled)
posted by gsteff at 2:20 PM on September 23, 2007

Aha, here's a link to a fairly recent post from Google employee's blog, in which he discusses the new fast-indexing of dynamic content, and links to several other places where it's been mentioned [1, 2, 3, 4]. It looks like they started indexing by RSS with the Blog Search and have now begun implementing it site-wide.
posted by Partial Law at 2:34 PM on September 23, 2007

ALongDecember: yes. Google (and many other search engines) weight search terms more heavily in URLs, titles, and in headers (h1, h2 etc.) than in regular text.
posted by Tuwa at 3:20 PM on September 23, 2007

Wasn't this explained in one of the recent podcasts?
posted by R. Mutt at 5:43 PM on September 23, 2007

Not everyone listens to podcasts.
posted by IndigoRain at 12:07 AM on September 24, 2007