Page MenuHomePhabricator

A part of eo.wiktionary does not seem to get indexed by Google
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

'Vortaro angla-Esperanto' is an English-Esperanto dictionary, still under development but already with many thousands of entries. Since about March 2019, its URL has been: https://eo.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aldono:Vortaro_angla-Esperanto  
In that month. an administrator changed the URL from a simpler form to the current one. Until then, the contents were easily found by a simple Google search. Since the change to the new URL, Google - and other major search engines - can't find most of the dictionary's entries, though Bing and Google still sometimes return entries from a cached copy under the old URL: https://eo.wiktionary.org/wiki/Vortaro_angla-Esperanta  

For example, I did six phrase searches for entries which are in pages A-F of the dictionary, with the format:
site:eo.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aldono:Vortaro_angla-Esperanto   search_term
I didn't enclose the search terms in quotes.

The search terms were:
protests show no sign of abating
baby products
cabinet minister
it would be daft of us
each one earned our highest endorsement
below face value

All searches returned "did not match any documents".

I repeated the searches with Google's Advanced Search, limited to 'Exact word or phrase' and 'Language: Esperanto' (so no URL specified).  None of the searches found the complete phrase except that,  (to my astonishment) Google returned the correct page with the current URL for "it would be daft of us", (page 'D', cached on 17 November). More test searches using Google's Advanced Search for phrases on page 'D' were also successful, but this seems to be the only page in the dictionary that Google can find, and only by its Advanced Search, not by its URL.

If there is a solution to this mystery, I would be grateful to know it.

Mike Leon
Wellington, New Zealand

Event Timeline

DannyS712 raised the priority of this task from High to Needs Triage.Nov 24 2019, 8:58 AM
DannyS712 removed a subscriber: Vandofschool.
Aklapper renamed this task from "Invisible" Wiktionary to A part of eo.wiktionary does not seem to get indexed by Google.Nov 24 2019, 3:44 PM

I changed the task summary, as I was wondering what kind of feature request an "invisible Wiktionary" would be...

I don't think site:eo.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aldono:Vortaro_angla-Esperanto is valid, I think site: just specifies what host to look at, not the path?
site:eo.wiktionary.org it would be daft of us on Google returns a result of https://eo.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aldono:Vortaro_angla-Esperanto_d which is probably what you want?

Thank you Krenair. Of the six sample phrases in my original post, searches of the type: site:eo.wiktionary.org find :

protests show no sign of abating (page 'a')
and
it would be daft of us (page 'd')
but not the other four. So two of the first six pages of the dictionary have indeed been discovered by Google, and hopefully it will get around to the rest in my lifetime.

Cheers,
Mike Leon