Google’s forgetting the early web

mostlysignssomeportents:

XML pioneer and early blogger Tim Bray went looking through Google for
some posts he knew about from 2006 and 2008 and found that Google
couldn’t retrieve either of them, not even if he searched for lengthy
strings that were exact matches for text from the articles; he concluded
that “from a busi­ness point of view, it’s hard to make a case for
Google in­dex­ing ev­ery­thing, no mat­ter how old and how obscure,” and
so we could not longer rely on “Google’s glob­al in­fras­truc­ture as
my own per­son­al search in­dex for my own per­son­al pub­li­ca­tion­s.”

The good news is that Bing and Duckduckgo both maintain much more
complete indices of old posts and publications, and so if you’re looking
for stuff that’s more than a decade old, you can switch to one of
Google’s competitors to find it.

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/16/try-duckduckgo-or-bing.html