New Look for AskMefi on Google

October 9, 2008 12:18 PM

Google has a new way of indexing Ask Metafilter (among others).

But not Metafilter.

posted by WCityMike to MetaFilter-Related at 12:18 PM (15 comments total)

You mean the "13 posts by 9 authors" thing? That is odd (and kinda cool). I don't know if that adds anything to the search results.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:19 PM on October 9, 2008

Huh. Weird. Did you mean anything else WCityMike?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 12:20 PM on October 9, 2008

Huh. Yeah, that's kinda cool. Makes sense with their RSS-crazy attitude that they'd go there, I guess.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:33 PM on October 9, 2008

Looking at that Google link makes me wonder if there's some database magic possible there. "Comments on 9522" isn't an especially descriptive title, and removing "RSS feed for this thread Subscribe" from the description could leave some room for better search engine text.

And those would be my suggestions for more user-friendly stuffs.
posted by johnofjack at 1:39 PM on October 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

Here's something kind of strange: The new "x posts by y authors" doesn't show up for me in Chrome (though it does in Firefox and IE). I wonder why that is?
posted by solipsophistocracy at 1:40 PM on October 9, 2008

johnofjack, "Comments on 9522" is the actual post title for older posts: http://ask.metafilter.com/9522/.

Try searching for something within the results like site:ask.metafilter.com bunk bed for better looking search engine text.
posted by ahughey at 2:08 PM on October 9, 2008

"Comments on 9522" isn't an especially descriptive title

Yeah, keep in mind that WCityMike's linked searches start with all the oldest posts first, which don't have titles (we added them in 2005 sometime), but like ahughey said, throwing any keyword in the search shows newer posts first with better descriptions.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:34 PM on October 9, 2008

This will be useful. When I'm searching for a solution to a specific problem (e.g. googling a error message from the computer), often most of the search results are people who have asked the same question on some online forum and not received any responses.
posted by winston at 4:40 PM on October 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

Oh, I'd forgotten that older posts didn't have titles.

Well I'm happy to help add some. Thanks, Jessamyn, for sending the link....
posted by johnofjack at 5:58 PM on October 9, 2008

They were fooling around with this as far back as May.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:47 PM on October 9, 2008

Incidentally, it doesn't seem to work right on forums with pagination, which is most of them. You only see the counts and authors for the page they link to, even if it's the first page.
posted by smackfu at 6:38 AM on October 10, 2008

solipsophistocracy: Could just be basic A-B testing, and you got randomly picked on IE and FF. It's showing up in all three for me, both logged in and not.

I'm guessing it's not an even split, though, but who knows.
posted by disillusioned at 12:14 PM on October 10, 2008

Home sick from work, bored, titling things....

We have fewer than 2500 left to title.

I sure would love to know the answers to some of these questions, e.g. this one....
posted by johnofjack at 11:07 AM on October 14, 2008

Most of the ones I got were "computers & internet," with at least six about networking between wired and wireless computers.
posted by johnofjack at 10:12 PM on October 19, 2008

I think I just titled the last ones. And yeah, "computers & internet" was completely dominant - early AskMe was a lot more techy and a lot less relationshippy, it seems.
posted by donnagirl at 10:18 PM on October 19, 2008