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Re:Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on th... by lukeschlather on Thursday March 21, 2019 @11:49AM (#19453740)
This is an example from yesterday:

"azure" devops agent "checkout" "freeze"

I'm obviously searching for something very specific here, and Google helpfully decided to show me results omitting "freeze" and "checkout" so I had to quote them.

I also notice that it looks like Google thinks that check-up is the same thing as checkout, which in context are not synonyms, though this would require Google to infer "git checkout" but I didn't include git because that would introduce another universe of unhelpful results.

https://dzone.com/articles/getting-started-with-jenkins-the-... was included which doesn't include "azure" at all, though this is obviously Google being cheeky.

Of course I could also call this somewhat sinister, as Google is basically saying I should ditch a direct competitor to their services and instead use a self-hosted service. Or maybe I'm projecting since I would like to ditch Azure DevOps and use Jenkins, but in any case there's an example.

Feel free to play with it: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS820US820&biw=1...

Of course, in this case it was a networking problem so I do have to admit that usually when Google starts ignoring what I typed it's because the answer to the question is something else entirely. Though sometimes I know exactly what I'm asking for and Google doesn't get it.

Re:Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on th... by JoeSmithson on Friday March 22, 2019 @04:13AM (#19460429)
Wow THANK YOU! I have been asking for an example of this for literally years.

I think possibly what is happening here is that the index believes "azure" is on the page.

Consider the second result here: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22azure%22+%22Allows+adding...

(the one that starts java.dzone.com but leads to the same article).

It appears to have captured at index time a phrase "Microservices and Serverless on Azure" that is no longer in the artcile (possibly a link to another article).

Perhaps a Googler can explain exactly what is happening.