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Last night I cleared the history and cookies from my browser as I often do. Later I decided to check in here to see what was up -- except my feeble mind failed me and I couldn't remember the exact URL to the site. "No problem", I said, so I "just Googled it", as the kids say these days.
My search was pretty specific: "bigcloset topshelf". Well I got plenty of matches, only NONE of them pointed here. I thought that was strange, so I looked on page 2, page 3, and so on. I continued until page 13 and never saw the site, only evidence that there are lots of people hosting virtual copies of the site. I eventually cut and pasted the URL from the source of a story I'd downloaded some years ago, and chocked it up to a fluke.
This morning for grins I repeated the exercise and to my surprise I got the exact same results. So my question is, did we or someone close do something to piss off the almighty Google? Or do I still have pieces in my system of a hijacker that visited me a couple weeks ago? On Friday, the same search string returned at least 4 hits to the site in the top ten on the page.
Hugs
Carla Ann
Comments
Yes
For a time, I advertised on google. Since I stopped advertising there, they do not list the site in searches. They insist that this is because they cannot reach the site, despite the fact that google bots visit the site THOUSANDS of times per day and visit hundreds of pages each day. Google in fact, is the largest user of the site by far and amounts single-handedly for almost ten percent of page visits in a day. (Bots are not counted in stats, though.) I've given up trying to persuade them that they are jackasses.
The proof is in the pudding, do a search using the title or relevant phrase from a story posted in the last few days; google will almost always find it for you, right here on the site that they insist their search bots cannot index.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Any "search engine"...
...that allows indexees to buy their way to a faux relevance or popularity isn't to be trusted in any case.
The notion of a "big closet" is near and dear to the hearts of many enterprises, so it's entirely possible that many enterprises have simply bought their way to the top of the list. The list of results suggests that this might be the case for at least a few of them.
It's a bit like asking a hooker for a character reference, though.
The secret of any search is to be as specific as possible, so "Big Closet Sephrena" pulls up references starting on page one, where "Big Closet Erin" pops it back to page four. Erin is a more common name than Sephrena.
The interesting thing about the results is that the Big Closet references start out with:
so I suspect that the structure of the site, in which "BC" lives as a subdirectory rather than at the "root," and evidently exists as a server-side alias as well, has something to do with the "skewed" results on Google. Google doesn't like subdirectories, because they're commonly used by web spammers to make their sites seem like something they're not.
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
It is definitely google
Spread the word around to use Bing as the search engine to use since google plays politics with theirs. This is most definitely not random, it is deliberate and targeted towards us. The 2 sites searches are displayed for comparison below:
Sephrena
Actually....
Bing is Microsoft, and plays politics too... Just not with us. Yet.
When I need to find the site, I just google myself. My blog is like, one of the first results.
Abigail Drew.
yes
Searching an authors name from here seem to result in links that lead here.
Google
I don't use Google. I have Yahoo (new home page sucks though) and all I ever have to type is bigcl and guess what? I get Big Closet every time. On my desk top though I have Big Closet in my favorite's. However, since I presently don't have internet I am on my mother's old laptop sitting at McDonalds :)
Bing
I don't care for bing... mostly because of *how* they got their start.
like 10 years ago Bing was originally a Virus.
It was an internet explorer toolbar that would attach itself to your browser and then hijack it sending it to various advertising sites instead of what you wanted. Then if you tried to remove it, you'd not find it listed anywhere in the add/remove programs list. Bing made a VERY big nuisance out of itself when it first started out.
Of course the net was young then and window's 95 was *the* thing to have....
Things change
Some things like google devolved, and bing evolved. Everything changes. Maybe even next year all of this will change too :)
Sephrena
Google has become more and more useless
Google has become more and more useless.
I am constantly finding it's results lacking now.
It doesn't find stuff it should even with exact names.
and you get way to many strange other things in your results.
And I get tired of having to run a search twice whenever Google decides I want something different then what I typed in. “showing results for _______ instead of _______â€
As far as Google searches for “bigcloset topshelf" go, I don't find the site either, but I do find sites with links to it or mention it.
-----
I did find this however:
http://www.amazon.com/BigCloset-TopShelf/dp/B003980B6I
Intresting!
bcts kindle edition?
WOW! How come you'd never mentioned making a kindle app for BCTS Erin?
Abigail Drew.
It's there
It's just not reliable yet. When Piper gets time, she tinkers with it. I'm not going to tell you how to access it because Piper wants only a few Alpha testers.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Another reason to avoid using Google
I use ixquick.com for web searches, and if you search for "bigcloset" the very first result is for BCTS.
Google has changed from being the fun, innovative, hip company that wanted to do cool things. Now their single goal is to find out everything that can about you. It's at least a year since I quit using Google and all its parts (excepting the occasional youtube video). It was a bit of work to find substitutes for search, email, maps, docs, spreadsheets, reader, and all that, but I'm very glad I did. It amazed me how much of my data and information Google possessed.
Kaleigh
My reasons for avoiding using google
1) The google image search program broke sometime in the summer of last year and twice crashed my laptop. I since moved over to using bing image search which has a great way of finding image sites I want to look at and is quite fast and not memory heavy.
2) google has not always put the most relevant sites or things im looking for up top. lots of time they are pages down buried. Ridiculous less relevant search requests were always displayed first.
3) I do not trust google in the same way I would never trust facebook - both are bad both using advertising and sell peoples data they collect with a bit of subterfuge from data mining.
So I dislike google.
Sephrena
so then...
which searches do you like?
search engines
Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if Google and Facebook merged into one. They could call themselves BooGoo if the name's not taken.
I use ixquick to look up everything except maps, for which I use Bing maps. The reason I like ixquick is that it's simple and clean.
I have tried some others - Blekko is good, but I began to feel it's meant for clever people and I don't always feel clever. I know a lot of people like Bing.
Facebook
Facebook won't do a deal with Google, as they've already done one with Microsoft (who also now own Skype).
Sadly most formerly independent big search engines have now outsourced their results to one or the other - Ask is powered by Google, AltaVista and Yahoo by Bing. There are a few "meta search engines" which don't have indices of their own but search and collate from both Google and Bing (via Yahoo BOSS) - Dogpile, Metacrawler and Webcrawler for example (three different front ends to the same service). Ixquick is also a meta search engine but doesn't advertise which engines it uses. It's notable in that it doesn't forward your client details to the search engines it uses, so presumably anyone performing the same search from any computer would get exactly the same results (whereas Google in particular remembers your previous searches and the links you clicked in an attempt to produce a more personalised results page).
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
I mainly use
bing and yahoo, but I tried ixquick.com and it works great. The image searching on it though could be streamlined more towards the way bing does theirs though :) but the web searches on it do good :)
Sephrena
Perhaps google is beginning to flush TG content out?
Don't know how true that may be but if its a pattern occurring to many more tg sites, perhaps we are onto something Dr. Watson!
The fastest way to fix this is to contact your federal Representatives and Senators and write to them describing this issue and perhaps draft legislation for more federal oversight with the FCC and its penalties on search engine companies for discrimination and "cock ups."
Sephrena
I suspect
I suspect that if there is a reason related to content it is probably an automated miss-labeling due to the frequency of certain terms. What I would guess is that while it is not actually filtering the site out as explicit it is being some how labeled as porn related due too all the sexually related terms on the site. The bots think this is a garbage site. This is however just a guess.
Research?
Kaleigh, that sounds like a great tip but I don't know anything about ixquick. Do you have any way of telling whether they are also in the evil data mining game and selling everything about us and our computer use habits to Karl Rove, every credit card company on the planet, whoever collects the refined data and sells it to the FBI and CIA because if the agencies collected it directly themselves that's prohibited by law to protect our privacy, and whoever is collecting it for Obama's political operatives? (That's not conspiracy mongering, that's just reading and watching the news. Sadly. pout.)
Google and Facebook are the most well-known abusers of their access to what we do while thinking we are in the privacy of our own homes, but do the relative unknowns just apear to be clean and nice because no investigative reporters have paid them any attention so far? It seems to lil ol me that it is sort of like an arms race? When the friendly and sweet startup gets big enough to throw its weight around and get away with things, it will be a lot less respectful of our privacy and then - as soon as we find out what they're up to - we start looking for a new startup that just wants to be our best and coolest friend. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Meantime, there's a bookmark in my toolbar (it only sounds painful) for ixquick.com and I will try it out after first trying to learn a little about them. Is slashdot still good for information/rumors like that? It's been ages since I used them and they've been through a lot since then.
Agreed that Bing (Microsoft) is just as evil as Google. Much worse than Google, really.
Annemarie
young & jaded :-(
They say they aren't
ixquick says they don't collect your personal info. I believe it.
But I regard Bing as safe, too - Microsoft has surprisingly come out on the side of consumer privacy. They took a lot of heat for wanting to add the option of not being tracked to their web browser. They've also improved it a lot.
I'm skeptical (about MS)
I'm skeptical about MS. By default "Windows 8" logs you in to MS servers and automatic cloud computing and storing all your activity. You have to deliberately make a secondary "local" account to avoid this if you do not want to have all your activity mirrored on their severs. Now while this may have some useful aspects, backup remote computing etc., doing so by default and without obviously notifying people seems at least suspicious to me.
I know we all do and put a lot of info online, but this a unified copy of everything you do while logged in linked to your user ID and MS account and what ever info you used to register windows. The question is what is their motive for this, if it is a benefit they should be touting it not obscuring it. And how are they using or guarding this data? Windows has enough popup warnings and security cautions on everything else, so why does it just quietly mirror all your activity to it's own servers without a whisper?
I guess google has done the
I guess google has done the same thing they did to BCTS to crystalhall. As of today it doesn't show up in searches. It worked yesterday.
Edit: Hmm, crystal hall seems to be working as a search word for others and intermediately for me. Some times it shows up, sometimes it doesn't. and never does on my phone anymore.
Conspiracy or Cock Up?
99 times out of 100 it's cock up.
I'd be very surprised if Google was deliberately leaving organisations out of its searches which did NOT advertise with them. It wouldn't be a very effective search engine if it did. Let's face it, if the CE of Google was to drop the entire income BC has ever paid them, he wouldn't be bothered to pick it up! BC is hardly going to be top of their list of organisations to hit.
Secrets leak out. It would take only one disaffected staff member to spill the beans to do tremendous damage to the company's image, worth billions.
My suspicion is there's some techy problem which is preventing it seeing the front page.
Mine too
But the annoying thing is they won't admit that there could possibly be a screw up on their end. The fact that I can see their bots visiting the site, to them doesn't mean that their bots are visiting the site. The fact that they can't find any data on the site, to them means that their bots are not visiting the site and it must be my fault because it can't be theirs.
Foogled again.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Well, if you type
Well, if you type 'site:bigclosetr.us' into the search tool, it comes up with the main page, plus the topshelf page.
What that seems to me to me is that they've indexed the page itself, but they don't think any of the keywords that -we- would think are reasonable are appropriate to the page.
I think, somehow, that they have bigclosetr.us listed in one of their 'poison' databases. (my term). Those are sites that they index, but refuse to give any site rankings.
In fact, I just ran a page rank check on bigclosetr.us - it has a 1/10 ranking.
When I hit the end of the search pages, and told it to show me everything, including hidden results because they are 'similar', the second page suddenly showed up links on bigclosetr.us for bigcloset topshelf search.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=big...
(that link may or may not work for others)
It looks like the main site that the search engine is able to 'see' is the User Account page. (weird).
Just an offhand suggestion, can you make the 'front page' a static index.html page, that then links to the dynamic sites?
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Front Page
The real front page, bigclosetr.us IS a static page. But I don't see how that would help.
The problem in part is that BC is listed on a lot of nanny sites as being porn. There is nothing that can be done about that and Google has decided that since BC has adult content, which it does, that I can't put spaces for advertising on BC. Which is asinine. BC has no porn in the legal definition. This is also the reason I can't have a Paypal box on the site. It is, quite simply, bigotry.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
You wonder how they decide though.
I kind of figured that, porn filtering.
Interestingly enough Google & PayPal do not seem to have problem with Second Life, the again as far as far as Google is concerned SL has a paid ad with them.
If you are not familiar with "Second Life" Virtual reality, while it is not all that goes on there it is notorious for virtual porn and sex.
Honestly
I think Erin has made the URL for the site about as easy to remember as can be. Think of all the "R-Us" stores. Add Big Closet to them = BigclosetRUs. That converts to bigclosetr dot us. I smiled at the simplicity of the URL when she first changed it over, it was a stroke of genius!
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
LOL.
WOW.Google is how I found out about u all.I was looking for a place to be myself & read when I found this site.LOL,I must have been having a really great day that day.
Signed Magical Kagome
I know I am not the prettiest of girl,but I love Myself.:)
I tried googling
my author name and Bike and neither showed up on the front page. Bing picked up on stuff from my own computer and led me straight there. However, I usually access these from my own machine and use favourites. It would seem these big corporations have their own agendas.
Angharad
Me neither or too
Yes, googling "Kaleigh Way" pops up a lot of real estate entries, and even the suggested searches of "Kaleigh Way stories" and "Kaleigh Way fiction" don't lead to my stories or BCTS. In fact, the only entry that DOES have anything to do with me says that I don't write any more.
Talk about stealth mode!
Carla, you can also
use an authors name to find the site through yahoo!
May Your Light Forever Shine
Oddly enough...
Google's autofill definitely knows BCTS, and although searching for "bigcloset" or "bigcloset topshelf" doesn't reveal anything useful on the first page, "site:bigclosetr.us" (a trick to force it to only display results from the domain) provides the domain front page, BCTS front page, and a bunch of author pages.
Oh, it's worth pointing out that while BCTS appears to be blacklisted on Ask as well, that's because Ask now outsources general search queries to Google. Obviously metasearch engines will find it - sites such as DogPile, DuckDuckGo and MetaCrawler collate their results from numerous sites, so even if one search engine blacklists a site, they'll find it from some of the other sites they search.
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Autofill...
...is usually supplied by your browser, not Google, so of course your own machine knows what you visit.
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I just recently got an Android phone
Google Chrome is the default browser on it, and though I have the domain memorized naturally one of my first searches -- with a brand new Google Account and no connecting to any previous email addresses or anything of mine -- was Big Closet Topshelf. It did, in fact, auto-fill the site name for me, but as everyone else has reported the first link was to Amazon, without a single link to the site available. Furthermore, upon trying to manually type in the site domain my phone began giving me errors claiming the site was unavailable on the Chrome service with no adequate explanation as to why.
It's working now, for some reason, but it took it a good couple of days to start.
Melanie E.
Gee...
...I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. When I want to log onto Big Closet, this is the search engine I use:
Love, Andrea Lena
I would say it's just Google page rank bug.
Today I've tried to find tech spec for some device via Google. It provided me with hundreds of links to strange sites with outdated versions of the spec and not a single link to manufacturer's site. Even search of the manufacturer's name provided no link to the manufacturer's site. And manufacturer's site was just name dot com. And there was link to spec from product page. Three clicks away.
And yes, Google search was "hacked" about three years ago (as in any query returned dozen porn or virus sites on firs couple of pages). After they corrected that problem it became almost impossible to find original source of most documents, or pages.