When I search for a topic that I or someone else has written about in an iNat journal article, e.g. like this, it would be helpful to have such posts accessible in standard search engines. I just tried to use Google and Karma to search for topics I’ve written about but my posts don’t show up.
Is there something about iNat journal entries or the functioning of standard search engines which blocks, ignores, or skips over such posts?
Hi Chuck! I tested this out for you, using Gemini (Google’s AI). I logged out of iNaturalist, to see what a public search would find, and your journal posts popped right up! So it looks like Google can see them. I hope that helps!
I have also seen iNat journal posts come up in search engine results.
I went incognito and. Eventually. Found this
https://inaturalist.laji.fi/journal/gcwarbler/116356-it-s-gonna-take-some-time
with the date in Finnish.
Plenty of Forum posts coming on the first or second page. But journal posts …
Google does not like ‘neotropical’ – I had to insist. Still didn’t find it.
Screenshot is not Incognito. But I added gcwarbler to the search.
A site-search on your user-name gets plenty of hits:
But it clearly doesn’t list everything. Thus, these standard searches all get the correct pages as the first hit:
but the specific example you gave does not:
(Obviously, any hits from this forum thread don’t count).
It seems unlikely that there’s anything intrinsic to the affected pages that’s the cause of this inconsistency. But there could be some kind of indexing issue which the site owner (i.e. the iNaturalist admins) may be best placed to investigate.
I just tried searching the titles of a couple of my journal posts using Google. One was the top result and the other was the second result.
Searching incognito ? Otherwise Google uses your search history. You have been here before …
Same results using a browser I never use, which has no iNaturalist history at all.
Your latest journal post is about Quercus palmeri – if I search that, I get the iNat taxon page, and Wikipedia and … but nothing more from iNat.
If I add Rare Plant – yes it does come up. The narrower the topic, the more likely. But will your potential readers only search for the rare plant aspect ?
Well, the original question was whether the search engines show them or not. This indicated they do. Like anything on the internet, it might be pretty buried unless you use the right terms and/or look through tons of pages to find it. And, in many ways, the search engines seem to have gotten worse over the years, probably as a result of so many possible results.
If a shepherd searching for lost sheep only found white ones, that wouldn’t prove there were no black ones. The issue here is that some journal pages get direct hits and some don’t. To understand why, the site-admins will need examples of the ones that don’t.
Here’s a site-search of your iNaturalist jounal posts:
This seems to list all twelve of them - but I didn’t check thoroughly. If there’s none missing, it would only prove that you aren’t affected by the problem. The OP has already provided a link to one of their journal posts that definitely does have this problem.
The issue is probably caused by the search-engines either failing to index certain pages, or by parts of the existing indexing becoming invalidated. The fact that the OP failed to find some of their posts using two different search-engines suggests the latter. This might happen if, say, a website changed some links in its site-map, but then nothing prompted the search-engines to re-crawl the website and update their page indexes. But I’m just guessing here: there could be any number of reasons why certain pages don’t get indexed properly.
Google provides some tools that can help diagnose issues like this and also make re-crawling requests (see: Why is my page missing from Google Search). But this can only be done properly by the owners of the website.
Given this, I would advise the OP to either contact the site-admins directly, or to make a formal bug report.
