Okay, that's hyberbole*, but I'd not really thought about it that much until Shintar pointed out to me on Monday that Parallel Context doesn't show up in search in Google.
Don't believe me?
I made a search using the "site" option and put it in Google and Bing.
Here's Google's result:
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| As of September 2, 2025. |
And Bing's result:
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| As of September 2, 2025. |
For curiosity, I reran the search on Google while removing the "site:" option, and...
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| As of September 2, 2025. |
In case you're wondering whether it's my settings, I run Google with SafeSearch set to "Off", so my occasional usage of profanity shouldn't be caught by the search engine.
I also did verify that the blog is visible to search engines:
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| Again, as of September 2, 2025. |
***
My first impression is that Bing doesn't do a very good job of searching PC either, since I deliberately chose the title of my most recent work of fiction which happens to be the title of two blog posts, but it couldn't even find those two as a top result. Still, that's better than absolutely nothing happening on Google's side.
I'm pretty sure that Google's search engine ought to have picked up entries on Google's own blogging platform, and they actually do. Just not my own blog.
Here's a quick search with the site command for Shintar's post on a farewell to the long running SWTOR podcast The Ootinicast:
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| As of September 2, 2025. |
So... apparently Google's search doesn't believe Parallel Context exists as an actual destination site, despite the blog's age. If I were using this blog for income** I'd be appalled by this development, but since I kind of prefer to be out of the limelight I'm fine with that. Shintar knows me well, as she told me she figured that I'd not be too torn up about it. Still, as she pointed out to me, it's an annoyance when you want to search for something but you can't find it.
Yes, that's Michael Richards before his role in
Seinfeld, playing someone who thinks he's invisible.
IIRC, Judge Harry Stone had issues with his eyes
in the episode so he was temporarily blind.
Seinfeld, playing someone who thinks he's invisible.
IIRC, Judge Harry Stone had issues with his eyes
in the episode so he was temporarily blind.
From Night Court's Season 2 Episode 11.
I personally think that it demonstrates that these gigantic tech companies aren't as all-seeing as they think they are. If there's one thing that life has taught me it's that karma is a bitch, and Big Tech has hubris in spades.
*At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling to get off my lawn, Google's been going downhill for a while. It's no surprise that I've been using Bing more often than Google these days.
**I'm not. I have all monetization options turned off. Besides, I think that monetization would actually go to Souldat, since he was the blog's "creator".
Hmm. That's interesting. And worrying. I replicated your google searches with the same result. Parallel Context doesn't exist. I tried it on Inventory Full, which I expected would be fine, given that it was the top link in your third screenshot, and it was there as normal.
ReplyDeleteThen I asked Gemini "Can you find a blog on Blogger aka Blogspot.com) by the name of Parallel Context. It's mostly a blog about video games." and it was able to find PC right away, reporting back: "I was able to locate a reference to a blog named "Parallel Context" on Blogger (blogspot.com)." It also gave me a link to another blog linking to PC (Atheren's blog in fact.) to confirm it was a gaming blog, so it was quite a comprehensive positive reply to my question.
The thing that amuses me about this is that all of those, Google Search, Blogger and Gemini are owned and operated by Google. It seems the right and left hands don't know what the gripping hand is doing. I also asked Gemini if it could explain why PC doesn't appear in Google searches but it gave me a whole load of possible reasons in general terms, not any one specific reason.
I do know that I get messages from Google sometimes telling me "Search Console has identified that some pages on your site are not being indexed due to the following new reason:" Ihad one only last week. Those tell you exactly what the issues are and i used to try fixing them but these days I just have a quick look, make sure it's nothing different to usual, then ignore them. I think there are a lot of things that can break search though. You could spend tour life trying to fix them all and never get to the end of it. That's how some people make a living...
I went into Google's Search Console (didn't know that existed until now) and I discovered that there's a Security issue where Google has detected possible phishing on user login. The thing is, it didn't give me any details, so I'd be left checking each freaking link to find out what is wrong.
DeleteCome on, Google, you're the "smartest person in the room (tm)", meet me halfway on this and at least tell me where the problem is.
Oh, and I don't even know if that's the issue here, either. My first guess is that a blog I linked to is hacked and points to another locale now, but that's just a conjecture at this point.
DeleteBeyond that, I have to wait for results of crawling to find out what Google deems problematic.
I think I might have found it. Hawtpants of the Old Republic, Njessi's old blog, has apparently been hacked and spews spam and other problematic stuff. I removed the link to the blog.
Delete/plays taps
Also, Rades' old blog, Orcish Army Knife, apparently is no more. All I get is an alert from Cloudflare saying there's an issue resolving to the server.