monitoring the abyss

Not long ago, I commented that my blog was receiving about 1/2 its hits from MSN Search Live, or Live Search, or whatever they choose to call it.

...

Out of curiosity, I ran some searches there myself. This was due to the fact that some of the searches didn't have a a referring "phrase". I wondered why a search would hit my blog if it was not sent there by an actual query string.

I didn't figure out the answer, but I did verify that Search Live would pass the query string to my hit tracker, so I remained rather puzzled.

Even more puzzling is the fact that suddenly I quit having Search Live hits altogether. How bizarre! First, I have fully 50% of my visitors arriving via Search Live. Then ... Nothing!

So, I searched for my blog via Search Live again. Gone. Not a trace. No proof that I ever existed.

There are some anomalies on Google as well. Now, my blog is not precisely invisible. I do not know why, but (for instance) yesterday when I posted about the failure in the OpenSUSE 11.1 linux kernel update, that post was in the Google search engine within 5 minutes.

I know this, because I wrote my post -- and then I started looking for solutions. Lo and behold, I found ... my own post.

I used to get a few google hits over here on MTA as well. And now, nothing. Apparently, no one is ever interested in the topics I write on. That is, any longer. I guess the financial crisis has passed.

But then again, if I do a Google search on specific phrases in this blog -- limited specifically to this website -- I can't find those phrases.

On the other hand, this blog has not disappeared totally from Google. In fact, there are posts that I have actually REMOVED that are still instantaneously found (of course, the links yield a 404). And, for the most part if I search specifically for my blog titles, I find them on Google.

But, if I search for the sort of content that is within these pages -- no hits. That is contrary to my search engine experience. Usually, if I put quotes around a unique phrase on a web page, a search for that phrase will find the page.

So, it occurs to me that there may be a lot of trees falling in the forest that I would like to hear, but I can't find them.

There was a time long, long ago in a place faraway when my business website would be in the top 10 of common search queries. Then it faded ... and faded. Mostly due to intense net commercialization and head-on competition. Yeah, I'm an early adapter ... but not much of a market genius.

This is different. This is "not there at all."

So, if large chunks of internet are fading from view, how do we find each other? Inquiring minds want to know.

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Update: More strangeness. The MSN Search bot showed up minutes after I made this post. So, I have 206 hits from the google bot and 1 from the msn bot.