ZZZ

At reference 1, I noted that something had gone wrong with blog search, that is to say the search box provided top left, that is to say second left, after the blogger symbol, on the third line of a Microsoft Edge flavoured display or on the fourth line of a Google Chrome flavoured display - on a PC. Don't know about telephones where I don't use it very often. This being the blog search which was usually very reliable, picking up new posts more or less immediately.

After a while I found myself at reference 2, from which I learned that this was an occasional but known problem to do with the Google robots not indexing this or that page for some reason. Arcane talk of search settings - which I know nothing about and so never fiddle with them - so I elected to do nothing. Then yesterday, I noticed that searching was working again for new posts.

Thinking that maybe it was working again for amended posts too, I added the search key 'zzz' to all the posts for the offending period. Search is now working again.

Perhaps the root cause of all this was some transient outage at Google Central, resulting in some chunks or data, some files, being marked as indexed when they were not. Too expensive or too difficult for the engineers to track down all the files involved and to fix all the indexes.

I associate to occasional problems with Microsoft's File Explorer, where files which are offline are not indexed. The story seems to be that it tries to be clever about its search indexing, not attempting to do everything. So if you use a new search key which it has not indexed, it has to do the search the hard way, but omitting any files, otherwise in scope, which happen to be offline. So it is sometimes necessary to force a folder to be fully online - perhaps by copying it - before attempting the search.

From where I associate to the rather different problems caused by more or less subtle differences between different search engines. For example, is the search for any occurrence of the search key or is it only occurrences of the search key delimited by recognised separators like punctuation and spaces? Otherwise, are you doing a part word search or a whole word search? So you do File Explorer search to find all the files satisfying some search term, and are then puzzled because Word search fails to find the term within a qualifying file. Which might happen if, for example, you want to find out when you last wrote about hippopotami. You're quite sure you have written about them quite recently, but can't think quite when or why.

PS: Bing search tells me that 'ZZZ' is either a corporate accommodation operation (whatever that might be), snapped above, or a band from the Netherlands.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/08/wellingtonia-38.html.

Reference 2: https://support.google.com/blogger. 

Reference 3: https://www.zzz.co.uk/.

Group search key: zzz.