This is a two parter. One: there's a disparity in behavior between the search box on the bottom and top of Ask. Two, why isn't 'recent activity' set to nofollow like profile pages?
Why does the 'recent activity' page get indexed by Google? (and other spiders) It's unhelpful on several fronts. The quoted text is but a subsection of the full post anyway, meaning you're only finding things from a persons first few words. The returned result has a plethora of probably unrelated posts on it, making finding what you were searching on less useful. Last and worst, searches on multiple terms that turn up activity are probably less relevant since odds are on those terms being spread across multiple posts. That's great if I want to find out who has written about pumpkin chunkin events AND kitchen knives, not so great if I'm searching for pumpkin carving tips.
Two, the search box on the bottom of the current Ask listings yields a different set of results than on the top - ONLY activity pages. My lightroom search turned up ONLY activity pages at the bottom where the top gets individual posts. I can see how that might be useful (see above) in limited cases, but since it gives no indication what it's doing it's damned confusing.
In thinking (and looking at the additional search options on the Google result page) about it I presume the bottom theoretically searches all of Metafilter where the top limits itself to Ask. Except clearly it's not really all of Metafilter since it doesn't turn up individual results, just recent activity. So perhaps it's just the blue.
Except, confusingly, it isn't since activity spans the sites.
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As for Recent Activity being indexed, I suppose I could put a noindex, follow on the page so Google can keep indexing the threads themselves and follow all the links but ignore the activity page itself.
posted by mathowie at 10:49 AM on October 31, 2007