Old, to the point, websites hand-written in notepad.exe are rarely in the top 5-10, even when they have precisely the answer you’re looking for.

Not sure if it's Google discriminating against old sites, or if the new sites just have such incredible levels of SEO-fu that a static, just-contains-what-you-want site has no hope of getting selected for results

Month after month, year after year, search results get worse, and harder to sift through. At this point, google is mostly a way to find wiki articles despite typos (because Wikipedia’s search is bad and can’t handle typos).

Google does this to make every tech worker not working for Google, and thus Google's competition, less productive.

</outlandish conspiracy theory>

I don't know off-hand if it's possible with the search (e.g. it might use a last-selected version cookie) but we should probably be using version-specific 'bangs'. `!pg12` or whatever, in my case.

Worse if you are looking for Dave Smith. You'll get David Smith, because Dave=David, even though you know Dave never identifies as that.

Then add it fixing spelling errors. Which often are not. Rare term? Must be a spelling error!

Part of this, is because most people are non-precise, and also because Google wants voice input to work well. So there, their, they're are the same thing, but can also synonym to things like them, and they.

Point is, Google is trashy for any search not involving cats, or explosions. Quotes barely work, so the only way to mitigate this a bit, as google removed the + search modifier a decade ago, is always, use verbatim, under search tools.

And hope Google hasn't broken it that day. Which they do often.

Information rots over time, decaying from true to false. Some facts are eternal, many aren't.

Since then it seems he really has gotten it together, and even had a project show up on the first page here. So now I suppose the robots.txt entry doesn't matter much, but it's still there anyway.

The newspaper doesn't have to do anything.

Something that Wikipedia reminded me, rtf is obligatory only in the EU and search engines are not obliged to comply with it on its international websites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten