Forum:Searching and the "recently edited" list

I was searching for pages that might have relevance to Avenge Me! (Horde), having found that page missing. Used the Google search... and up pops a whole host of pages with evidence that the only relevance was the "recently edited" list. As time will have passed since those pages were scanned by google, the page I was searching for would no longer appear even there. Thus, false positives.

This is probably an issue for Wikia, but can the "recent edits" list be removed from the text being indexed for searches? --Eirik Ratcatcher (talk) 21:17, 16 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Because the real quest name is Avenge Me!. -- 21:24, 16 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I had already guessed that the page was miscreated. My complaint is about the false positives in the search. --Eirik Ratcatcher (talk) 23:01, 16 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I see what the "problem" is: when an admin moves an article and chooses not to automatically create a redirect on the original article, it doesn't show up in the delete log. See the page history and Coobra's move log. -- 23:10, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

One more try... My search term was "Avenge Me". When I did my search, I got as results a handful of pages that, on my view, did not include either of those words. The summary on the search results page showed "Avenge Me!", followed by some time indicator (eg "50 seconds"). I have seen "recently edited pages" lists on other wikis I have visited. From these, I infer that when pages get re-indexed for searching, whatever was most recently edited when that page was fetched for indexing is considered as "part of the text to be included in search terms".

That is, each time a page is re-indexed, a new set of spurious terms will be included in the list of words for which that page can be returned as a result. The easiest remedy that comes to mind would be to have Google.com (or whatever engine does the crawling for the "google search") use some profile variety that doesn't include the "recently edited" list.

Not that you haven't discovered a valid problem yourself, Gourra. It's just that I don't see the connection between the two issues. --Eirik Ratcatcher (talk) 23:43, 16 June 2009 (UTC)


 * The "issue" is that the cache on Google search is very flawed in that it takes a snapshot of a page at a random time, and unfortunately "Avenge Me! (Horde)" got caught in this. You'll have to ask Google to make a new cache for this, or Wikia to not include texts that is in the "Recently edited pages" box, but there's nothing we can do about it. -- 07:54, 17 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I suspected as much. I'm sure there's an easy-to-find link to where to whine at wikia, if I knew where to look for it.  So, I guess I'll be looking for it. ;) --Eirik Ratcatcher (talk) 21:36, 17 June 2009 (UTC)


 * There is really no easy way to tell search engines to ignore a section of text that is in a page. As I see it, the only solution would be to remove the recently edited box, and replace it with an iframe that shows an outside page, and block the search engines from indexing that other page. Well, there is another way, creating the text with javascript, but it is somewhat unreliable. 16:55, 23 June 2009 (UTC)


 * My thought was to have it simply use a skin that didn't include that list on the page. I don't, though, know how to implement that. --Eirik Ratcatcher (talk) 19:30, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

This is something we are having a bit of a discussion about within Wikia. I'll get to you if we come up with a good solution. 13:31, 25 June 2009 (UTC)