I often search for "steemit lukestokes losing eternity" whenever I want to get the URL for this post and send it to someone. Today, I was surprised to notice it didn't show up in the search results.
Like, it didn't show up at all.
I scrolled through pages and pages of results, but it's not there.
Duckduckgo, however sees it just fine as the top result:
You may notice, it also lists the version of that blog post which I originally wrote on my old lukestokes.info blog (which I've recently converted to a consulting site). I think Google may have marked the Steemit version as a duplicate or maybe even as a plagiarized version and removed it from the search results. That got me thinking about my other blog posts which also exist on Steem:
If those sound interesting to you, feel free to check them out:
- https://steemit.com/philosophy/@lukestokes/determining-determinism
- https://steemit.com/artificial-intelligence/@lukestokes/the-morality-of-artificial-intelligence
- https://steemit.com/philosophy/@lukestokes/where-does-your-morality-come-from
- https://steemit.com/religion/@lukestokes/losing-eternity
In an attempt to fix the problem, I edited all those posts on Wordpress and added this to the top:
<strong><em>The home for this post (and the rest of <a href="https://steemit.com/@lukestokes">my blog</a>) is now /steemit.com/philosophy/@lukestokes/where-does-your-morality-come-from">on the Steem blockchain</a>.</em></strong>
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Which shows up like this:
I also noticed one of the top results is my Steem introduce yourself post which was still linking to my old lukestokes.info version. I went ahead and edited that old post to update the link:
You do know there's no longer a 7-day restriction on editing old posts, right?
If you have an old blog or you write for other publications and you want your Steem blog posts to come up in search results, you might want to consider linking to your Steem posts from your blog. I'm hoping this will help Google reindex these pages and include my post back in its search results.
This got me thinking... if search engines start silently removing pages from results like this, will we have to go back to maintaining our own indexes of pages, like the early Internet? If we can't trust search engines for results, will things come full circle back to online directories?
