google index of SF?

[Handruin]

Do you think it's worth having google index this forum? Presently google doesn't like the dynamics of phpbb due to session implmentation. I read an article on how to fix the issue, but I wanted to hear opinions.

The change is fairly easy to implement, and I thought it might help give some exposure to the site. My thoughts were that people searching for help may find references.

 

[Handruin]

reference

 

[CougTek]

I don't mind if our posts can be googled or not. If it can attract tourists, then it might be good.

It would be weird to find 2552+ results on Google when typing my nick though.

 

[CougTek]

Wow! Just verified on Google and despite the omission of this site, there's already 362 mentions of myself on Google I hope I won't have to start to disguise to stop the horde of fans from arrassing me for an autograph ;-)

I'll browse the results to make sure I'm not on any FBI/CIA top-xx list of enemies of United States or something...

 

[CougTek]

Anyone knows what language is this? One folk there quoted one of my pre-MBF post at SR and I would like to know what the others said about it.

 

[CougTek]

Romanian...cannot be babelfished

 

[Mercutio]

They appear to be saying that IE6 is worth installing.

 

[P5-133XL]

I don't mind being googled. I googled myself and found far fewer than last time when SR had been indexed. Now only my SR profile remains.

 

[timwhit]

Go for it. Then I can use google to search SF, instead of having to use the useless phpBB search tool.

 

[CougTek]

Merc, you liar. You're not looking at all like Wayne Knight as you all made us believed, you're Black! Ahh, what we can learn on Google...

 

[Mercutio]

That awful Baz Luhrmann movie. Pay it no mind
fatwa on all who employ Leonardo DiCaprio (who is, of course, a reason to hate moviegoing, all on his own).

Harold Parrineau is the actor who played Mercutio in that version. He played Augustus "Wheelchair" Hill on "Oz", a role that he made very believable.

Needless to say, I look nothing like him, and I have the good sense to stay out of the trainwrecks that are Luhrmann productions.

 

[sechs]

The problem with looking for stuff I've posted is that I end up with a lot of hits in a foreign language....

 

[Tannin]

Yeah. Go for it. A good search function would be a real blessing.

 

[CityK]

I had to laugh when I googled for my handle and it pulled up a rather peotic piece I had written here on SF:

Google Search[/url]]They're all full of crap. Stand by your products you bunch of penny pinching, consumer confusing, cheapskates!!

 

[blakerwry]

the good thing about my nick is it is completely unique. All hits for blakerwry are actually related to me.

 

[P5-133XL]

Merc. What about you? You have some rather personal stuff posted here. Do you not care if it gets goggled?

 

[Mercutio]

I don't mind.

 

[flagreen]

Merc. What about you? You have some rather personal stuff posted here. Do you not care if it gets goggled?

Are you kidding? What a great way to meet girls! Believe me, there a bunch of them out there who would just love to take care of him.

 

[Handruin]

If everyone feels comfortable with this, I will make the change this evening. I can't guarantee it will help, but I'm hoping it can't hurt our exposure.

Only downside would be the amount of time the crawler would spend on the site. Hopefully google isn't too intrusive.

 

[timwhit]

I doubt the crawler will hurt performance that much. Plus, I don't think the crawler hits a site all that often, maybe once a month at most.

Will SF be cached on Google as well then? Great, even if SF is down I can still read old threads.

 

[Handruin]

I believe google crawls ever 30 days if the content of the site changes. I've also request google to crawl on the main page, so you'll often find old news material in searches.

I would assume SF would be cached, but I don't know how, or when they do this.

 

[timwhit]

I think they do it during the crawl of the site. Just about every site that is indexed on google has a cache nowadays.

 

[Mercutio]

I enter SF through google pretty much daily - I don't like leaving "tracks" in other people's location bars. It appear to me that google hits ~ every 2 weeks. More often than monthly.

 

[LunarMist]

That Google index makes me a nervous. :eekers: Do they know my persona? I feel so exposed, but other sites must be the same. Mercutio is common enough. Maybe I should have chosen a different name.

 

[Mercutio]

Are you kidding? What a great way to meet girls! Believe me, there a bunch of them out there who would just love to take care of him.

You jest, sir, yet I see not the smiley face.

 

[flagreen]

Hey I'm serious. Hence no smiley face. I may even meet a lady or two who knows? If Tommy Lee could snag Pamela Anderson then there is hope for you and me.

 

[Handruin]

The change has been made and a request sent to google to get them going. Only time (and hopefully webstats) will tell.

Let me know if there are any weird issues with logins and things of that nature. This piece of code I changed relates directory to the session ID.

 

[Handruin]

This tool is kind of neat:

http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/

When I switch the user agent to googlebot, it validates the change I made because the session ID is no longer appended to the URL.

To test this, run the tool with and without googlebot and you will see the results at the bottom of the page change. The ones without googlebot have session ID's. Google hates session ID's in dynamically generated content.

 

[Howell]

You do realize I'm going to be upset if I have to actually work, right.

 

[Handruin]

I think the indexing worked. I've search for some of our topics just by the title, and I've found then in google. Finding less specific items is harder, so I don't know what this means.

For example, if you search for "ATI display interference", you will find storageforum.net listed at the top...

Search for "Things to do/see in Brisbane, Australia?"...guess who you find?

"Best movie you've seen"...second page of gooel...not to shabby for a common title.

"The invasion of the USA"...hmm...

If you guys ever find an SF result from google, or any search engine when you didn't mean to, let me know. I'd be interested in hearing about it.

 

[The JoJo]

Nice, great work Doug!

 

[Handruin]

I'm looking at my awstats and I think this index thing really is working. We may not be seeing tons of new members signing up, but I now have a list of 928 different keyphrases that had hits on SF from google. More and more typical searches are returning links to our site.

Those 928 keyphrases are just for January 2004!!!

In comparison, the entire month of November 2003 had 327. (This was prior to letting google index the forum, so I'm guessing this is based on the front page news)

Try google:
"how long do cdrs last?"...

"atto disk benchmark"...

"via km400 review"...

"motherboard shutdown cpu temp" (second page)

"hardies resturants indiana"... (hehehe)

"abit nf 7s"...

"nyc vehicules search"...

"using ghost with serial ata"...

"restoring hd"...

OK, I'll stop. Gets me excited to see references to our site when people search for basic things in google.

 

[The JoJo]

Cool! I just tried a few searches and it seems to work quite nicely! Way to go SF and Doug!