Google, you fail me.

I've been a advocate of Google for quite a while. I'm generally not the early-adopter type, and I certainly hadn't picked up on Google when they first went beta or anything (I'm just not that plugged in), but I did start using it in the fall of '99 when I heard some buzz on it and I noticed a friend and coworker using it at the office. It was hard not to: it stood head and shoulders above the competition at the time, and y'know, not being Microsoft is always a plus in my book.

So I was trying to find some information to an animated short that I had seen at an animation festival at the Coolidge a few years ago. I think it was a flash animation that had two kids sitting across each other discussing the merits of their cup-o-noodles that they were eating. I figured I'd find something, but no such luck. I actually remember having this same problem when I was trying to write about ramen last August. Eventually I figured I could just link to my original post, but Blogger (also owned by Google now) was acting up, so I was having a hard time finding the original post from the editing index.

So of course, I tried to google it.

And found... nothing.

WTF, yo?

Ok, so I realize that there's a lot of chaff in the blogosphere. You'll even find "blogs" now that are basically just being used as link farms, presumably trying to increase their search ranking by saturating the pages with link after link after link to porn, consumer sites, erectile dysfunction meds, ad promotion, porn, insurance, porn, and, well, porn. So I totally expect the search engines to do some kind of filtering to try to keep this stuff under control and maintain the relevancy of their search results.

I realize that there are very few people that read this blog who haven't stumbled on it by accident following the "next blog" link on the header of all the free Blogspot blogs out there. Still, this was annoying. I felt so, well, not relevant.

Hello, my name is Chopped Liver. Pleased to meet you.

So fine. We'll ditch the general search for references to the animated short and just do a search on my blog.

See? I'm being specific now. I'm not putting on airs about how important I think my opinions are. I just want to find something on my blog. Someone else might want to do that, right?

Nope.

If you do a search on "grey matter gruel" and just about any other noun, you either get the "tough noogies" page, or if you're lucky, you'll get a link to a page that links here. So I google:

"grey matter gruel" cup o' noodles - Nothing
"grey matter gruel" noodles - Nothing
"grey matter gruel" animation - Matt's page
"grey matter gruel" ramen - Matt 's page and the Bostonite webring

No such problem on Yahoo-exclamation-point or AltaVista. Dogpile and Webcrawler (apparently, both search aggregators) only find the top page. Oh, and nothing on MSN. Congratulations Microsoft, looks like you're in good company.

Ok, I think I see the pattern, after having some success with "running," "movie," "manhattan," "chinese," and "hoops." It looks like they stopped indexing the archives sometime in early 2004. (Geez, I am such a nerd.)

C'mon Google, you guys are smart -- you can do better than this. Or are you going to be like every other company that started out sharp and innovative and cool that just grew too much for their own good and got lazy and complacent?