The discussion is about why the 404 page on Discourse uses Google search instead of local search. pfaffman pointed out that using Google search is not helpful for sites that aren’t indexed and suggested using local search instead. codinghorror explained that Google is more effective at handling misspelled or incomplete searches, but pfaffman argued that local search is more useful when dealing with imported data.
Additionally, pfaffman mentioned that the Google search feature is supposed to be suppressed on private sites, but he initially thought it was still active on his private site. However, he later corrected himself in post 5, stating that the feature was indeed turned off on his private site. codinghorror suggested that any issues with the feature’s behavior could be a regression and asked techAPJ to investigate.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-wrong-or-stupid-slug returns the
page with some recent topics and at the bottom
but it uses a Google search. This is worthless for sites that aren’t indexed, if instead it returned a list of local searches, or, better, the search page.
This would come close to solving my “I can’t guess the slugs” problem for an import.
Because Google is quite a bit better in the “type random words into search, some of them misspelled or missing entirely, and get a decent search result” department.
That’s why.
The budget for that sort of effort is many orders of magnitude over what we at Discourse can bring to bear on the problem. Google has 57,100 employees many of whom work on search. We have.. eleven.
If you end up on 404, you are sending a strong signal that you need serious help. So we offer serious help.
(We do suppress this part of the page for private sites, obviously, as google can’t see into private sites. @techapj added that feature a while back.)
That much is true. When you’ve got a bunch of imported data, though, being able to through those words to the local search is gold. I think that to solve my “we want redirects for the old slugs, but don’t have the slugs” problem will be to redirect all topics to a local search for the slug terms.
That’s cool. Does “login required” == “private”? I’m getting the google search on this private site.
Could be a regression, @techapj can check into it.
I’m wrong. It is turned off on my private site.
Sorry, @techAPJ.