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Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degroot org> wrote:
> Op 20/01/2023 om 23:56 schreef Samuel B.:
> > (...)
> > Re: ToVolume. I can't remember which type of proximity technique I used for
> > that. (...)
>
> There are/were also your "fastProx" and "nestProx" includes for doing
> proximity patterns. It has been a while since I last used them. They
> tended to be /superseded/ by Edouad Poor's "df3prox-0.95" utility in my
> (slight) personal choice/preference ;-)
Hey, whatever gets the job done :D
> However, they are a notable part of my large collection of POV-Ray
> utilities created by the users community. Good opportunity to say a warm
> Thank You.
>
> --
> Thomas
No problem! It's cool that you are keeping a collection going.
I do wish it was easier to search for old things, though. It seems like all the
search engines only keep a partial index of the newsgroups.
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Op 03/02/2023 om 01:04 schreef Samuel B.:
> No problem! It's cool that you are keeping a collection going.
>
It is miscellaneous/monstrous thing ;-) jr encourages me to make it
better accessible, but /that/ is a hell of a job, and RL is increasingly
interfering.... :-/
> I do wish it was easier to search for old things, though. It seems like all the
> search engines only keep a partial index of the newsgroups.
>
Possibly the major crash POV-Ray experienced some time ago destroyed
part of the index too? However, I agree with you: items are often
difficult/impossible to find.
--
Thomas
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Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
> Possibly the major crash POV-Ray experienced some time ago destroyed
> part of the index too? However, I agree with you: items are often
> difficult/impossible to find.
I think there are ways to get search engines to recrawl/reindex a site over time
- might be worth looking into.
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On 2023-02-03 03:17 (-4), Thomas de Groot wrote:
> Op 03/02/2023 om 01:04 schreef Samuel B.:
>
>> I do wish it was easier to search for old things, though. It seems
>> like all the
>> search engines only keep a partial index of the newsgroups.
>>
> Possibly the major crash POV-Ray experienced some time ago destroyed
> part of the index too? However, I agree with you: items are often
> difficult/impossible to find.
No, the searches skipped results even before the crash. I can't count
the number of times I've had to hunt down an old post manually because
the search engine didn't find it.
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Cousin Ricky <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> No, the searches skipped results even before the crash. I can't count
> the number of times I've had to hunt down an old post manually because
> the search engine didn't find it.
There are instructions for "building your own search engine" - and i would
imagine this would be pretty manageable given it could be restricted to just
this site.
No idea who could set up a rudimentary test of this, but at the very least it
would crawl and index the entire site.
I think it would be really great to bea able to scroll through all of the zip,
inc, mcr, and other such files in a "digest" which was just the search
results...
Also, you could search by username, which would be particularly useful when
hunting down a file when you know who the author was.
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On 4/02/2023 00:27, Cousin Ricky wrote:
> No, the searches skipped results even before the crash. I can't count
> the number of times I've had to hunt down an old post manually because
> the search engine didn't find it.
Getting google to properly index the site is a constant battle. I have done all they
say I should do and set everything up using their webmaster tools. All I can do is
wait and hope that they catch up. It's difficult in that google may say one thing but
do another; this is part of the never-ending battle between search engines and those
who would wish to influence the results/come out at the top for a query.
I spent probably a full day working on this on and off using various of the
google-suggested methods and thought I had it sorted. But clearly if stuff is missing
then I need to re-visit it.
Screenshot of search console report is below: it is visiting us (and I do see them in
the server logs) but some things don't make sense (e.g. total bytes).
-- Chris
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Attachments:
Download 'crawlstats.png' (198 KB)
Preview of image 'crawlstats.png'
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Hi, Chris.
Working more than 8 years as an internet search system developer I can say that
SEO is a difficult way. Too much concurrency, no predictable results without
knowledge about the relevance function of the document body, which is a top
secret of Google.
At the same time there are some well known workarounds: SEO partnership, writing
posts on specialized forums, that are thematically related to our, for example.
Most reliable way is Google Ads, but it'is too expensive.
All the best,
--
YB
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Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
> Getting google to properly index the site is a constant battle. I have done all they
say I should do and set everythi
ng up using their webmaster tools. All I can do is wait and hope that they catch up.
It's difficult in that google may
say one thing but do another; this is part of the never-ending battle between search
engines and those who would wish t
o influence the results/come out at the top for a query.
>
> I spent probably a full day working on this on and off using various of the
google-suggested methods and thought I ha
d it sorted. But clearly if stuff is missing then I need to re-visit it.
I don't know anything about what software this newsgroup is running on or web
development in general, but I've used other forums that were set up on Drupal
or Simple Machines, or other forum software like that - some by people who I
can't really say had very much tech expertise at all (I have no idea if they had
help) and those forums had "internal search" tools/plugins/features that didn't
seem to rely on an outside search engine to provide the results.
When looking for information on my own system, I've used grep to dig through
files and find little snippets of what I was looking for.
How did the old search engines work? Lycos, WebCrawler, etc....
Can we get another search engine to index the site? Brave browser search,
Yandex, ...?
I don't know if this forum software has features like that, that can be added
via a plugin or something else, or if there's another platform that everything
can be migrated to that does (I know, I know - you'd rather drink drano....)
Just wondering what the non-big-tech-search-engine options are.
-BW
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On 4/02/2023 05:41, Bald Eagle wrote:
> There are instructions for "building your own search engine" - and i would
> imagine this would be pretty manageable given it could be restricted to just
> this site.
>
> No idea who could set up a rudimentary test of this, but at the very least it
> would crawl and index the entire site.
There are some open-source search engines that can index the site, and I have
considered using one.
If I did it should solve the problem for local searches. However at the moment fixing
the google search results has higher priority since that's what a typical POV-Ray user
would use to ask about something. If it doesn't index all pages we would have cases
where a user searched for something and while the answer actually exists and is in our
groups, google hasn't included it, so they don't get a relevant result.
> I think it would be really great to bea able to scroll through all of the zip,
> inc, mcr, and other such files in a "digest" which was just the search
> results...
>
> Also, you could search by username, which would be particularly useful when
> hunting down a file when you know who the author was.
Google provides means to understand what it's indexing. In particular, we can use
structured data as set out in
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data
All posts on the newsgroup have a JSON-LD object telling search engines that the
message is a forum post (type is DiscussionForumPosting) and other attributes,
specifically including the author.
If you are using the web view you can see this easily: view the source of this post in
your browser (usually control-U) then search for the word DiscussionForumPosting and
you will find them. For example here's what we said about your post:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DiscussionForumPosting",
"@id": "#web.63dd555f13ac33281f9dae3025979125%40news.povray.org",
"headline": "Re: Denoising POV-Ray images in Blender",
"dateCreated": "2023-02-03T18:45:00+00:00",
"datePublished": "2023-02-03T18:45:00+00:00",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Bald Eagle"
}
}
</script>
If I run the current page of this thread through the Google 'Rich Results Test' it
shows it saw and understood all the posts (the warnings are just for optional fields).
I have expanded the row where it saw your message (see attachment).
As far as I can tell the issue is Google isn't indexing *all* of our pages, regardless
of what I do (for example I tried using sitemaps in various forms and it still didn't
fetch all the URL's in the sitemap). I ran out of time trying to sort this and just
left it alone, hoping google would catch up eventually.
Post a reply to this message
Attachments:
Download 'richresults.png' (186 KB)
Preview of image 'richresults.png'
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On 2/14/23 02:18, Chris Cason wrote:
> As far as I can tell the issue is Google isn't indexing *all* of our
> pages, regardless of what I do (for example I tried using sitemaps in
> various forms and it still didn't fetch all the URL's in the sitemap). I
> ran out of time trying to sort this and just left it alone, hoping
> google would catch up eventually.
Hi Chris,
To chime in with a related topic; Many of us were using Thunderbird's
search facilities of the newsgroups over the formally less reliable web
based search / google search.
As, I think, you are aware, after the recovery from the crash the news
server is maintaining much less of the overall posting history. It's
often impossible to get to any older posts these days via Thunderbird.
I remember you saying the POV-Ray news server had been somewhat mangled
in the past to keep posts in most, but not all forums, for a very long
time. Something much longer the usual 12 months or so. My 'guess' is
that when the news server was restored most, if not all, news server
forums are now dropping posts after a much shorter time (12 months?).
Whether this worth fixing or not I'm unsure. Expect these days the
newsgroup interface not the primary one for most users. Having a
reliable way to search the forums should be primary the goal.
Aside: As I find time I've been manually downloading my own posts via
the web interface - and some posts of others - to plain directories of
per topic text for the thread and useful attachments. I can then use
linux commands as mentioned by Bill W to find my forum 'notes.' I've
been burning time since the crash doing this and I'm nowhere near
complete. I wish these days I'd not relied so much on the newsgroups as
a place to record stuff! :-)
Bill P.
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