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I have used Google to look for previous SN stories for a year or two now. Mainly because there have been inconsistencies with SN's own internal search engine in the past (that may have been fixed since). I use the "site:soylentnews.org" search parameter, plus the keywords, and I have a textbox that automatically adds the "site:soylentnews.org" bit to the query.
While writing this submission:
China Still Has Trouble Staffing the World's Largest Radio Telescope
I'm pretty sure that the following story exists on site, although I don't know where it is or know the headline just yet:
China Can't Find Anyone Smart Enough to Run its Whizzbang $180M 500 Meter Radio Telescope
So I search for stuff like "china radio telescope" and "aperture spherical telescope". No dice.
I use SoylentNews internal search, looking for "Aperture Spherical Telescope", and it works.
Let's try "china radio telescope smart enough". Nope, nothing.
Let's try the exact title of the submission. Welp, there it is, finally. Except that that just before finishing this journal entry a few minutes later, it no longer works (I checked to see if it was a special character issue, and it doesn't seem to be).
This isn't the only example that I've come across, and it seems to have gotten worse in recent weeks. IIRC I had trouble looking for previous stories for an opioid-related submission. These have been popping up often enough that I may just ditch the GOOG for this purpose, especially since SN's search seems to work just fine.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:39AM (2 children)
I haven't had a lot of luck with Google in several years now (though I'd also noticed that it has become even more useless recently); I had switched to Bing, but it has gone down the same path in the last couple of years. A newer open-source meta-search engine called Searx.me [searx.me] is currently outperforming them for me; when I tried your "China radio telescope" search just now, the article you were looking for was in fourth & fifth place, along with a few other earlier SN articles about it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:32AM
The instance at https://searx.org/ [searx.org] has different default preferences set up -- otherwise seems to work the same as your link to Searx.me
Thanks for the tip!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 09 2018, @05:20AM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by NPC-131072 on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:59AM
Google would never repress search terms containing the word "China". [theguardian.com] No. [itproportal.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Knowledge Troll on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:12AM
That would be the journal entry I wrote on their their publicly stated goal of measuring everything people do using microphones and the modern phenomena of talking about something with your friends then having it show up in a Google search result as a suggested item.</joke>
I wonder what the threshold is going to wind up being for getting the Gab treatment.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:31AM (1 child)
They followed jmorris from the Gab! We are being suppressed! Arrgh!!! I always knew it would come to this, if we tolerated insanity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:48PM
It's more likely it's all the wswswswsws links I've been posting.
Or Google could just be crap. I recommend using the Duck.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:00AM
Google is now inferior to both bing and duckduckgo.
I don't believe that bing or duckduckgo have gotten much better. It is really clear that google is getting worse.
Based on previous competency, we know that google is clearly able to provide good results. Google has clearly decided that many things take priority over giving good results.
Partly this is about pleasing horrible governments in places like China, Pakistan, India, Germany, and the UK. Partly it is about pleasing the RIAA and MPAA and similar. Partly it is about the ctrl-left politics that is pervasive at google.
Google isn't hurting for money. They can afford to fuck up their search engine for political reasons.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:50AM
Well now comrade, trying to get around the censor put in place by our glorious peoples republic keeping you from finding fake news articles dissing on the government? Mayhaps you should spend some time in reeducation. Google is doing great work in helping us all take a great step forward by supressing articles that may imply weakness. There was never a concern with staffing from the perspective that staff could not be found, it was simply that there were so many high quality han choices to choose from that it was difficult. Fortunately Ji in his great wisdom (may he rule forever) made the decision to shut down the telescope because he wanted to be fair to the great glut of smart workers.
Watch your wrongthink my friend.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @11:59AM
I can't find several posts I made a decade ago on the green site. Oh well.