Confessions of the Professions Adds More Search Features
December 14, 2021 — When it comes to searching this site, it is massive, with nearly 4,000 confessions as of the release of this news publication. There are thousands of indexed pages from Google and DuckDuckGo for Confessions of the Professions. Several years ago, we were confident that both Google and DuckDuckGo were doing their job of indexing and showing all results in their search engines, but several searches revealed nothing after our search queries. While we cannot blame Google or DuckDuckGo for what they deem as important on the website, we have re-implemented the native search, kept DuckDuckGo, and have also added a Google search, calling it Five Search Research.
In our early days, we were using Google search as our primary search, but after receiving two Google penalties at different times, our website was not able to appear in a Google search at all. This made searching on throughout the website for articles and infographic nearly impossible. It was then that we incorporated DuckDuckGo as our primary search feature, where it has been the primary search for over 5 years, where we believed it was doing a great job.
Unfortunately, a look into DuckDuckGo’s search functionality for Confessions of the Professions shows that something was lacking. DuckDuckGo is using Google’s search in addition to its own DuckDuckBot, but it was picking up categories and pages that we directed search engines not to index at all. DuckDuckGo is a great alternative search engine and due to its sense of duty for privacy, does not penalize any websites unless a direct action is taken against the website, which means contacting DuckDuckGo directly, as there are no de-indexing or blacklisting forms, and asking DDG to block it manually. Unfortunately, since DuckDuckGo lacks results for many of our pages, we decided that it is not the full-featured solution we are comfortable with using, especially when our primary directive is to help anyone find any confession on our website with a search query.
We understand there is competition for primary keywords and Google and DuckDuckGo decide to show search engine results based on what is most relevant and most important, although we do believe there has been some biases in the algorithm, with these search engines often favoring some pages over others, despite the fact that they may not be as relevant. Computer algorithms are not perfect and we do understand. However, both DuckDuckGo and Google have a feature known as site: and if you wish to search a website without any other websites coming up, you may do so by typing in site:confessionsoftheprofessions.com. Even with this method, knowing many of the articles on this website, and even searching for them directly, headline and URL, there were still times where both Google and DuckDuckGo are failing to show anything.
As a result, we decided to implement our native search feature back into the website, which is built into the website, where it looks directly at the database where all of its content is stored, and pulls the results based on any content it may find on the website. Considering that both Google and DuckDuckGo decide what to index and show in their results, we cannot take chances on not having any or specific pages NOT show up in a search query. We feel it is best to help our users find any article they wish, without solely relying on Google and DuckDuckGo to show every page of our website, though we do have a complete Archive page of every confession that has ever been published.
In addition, we have also added a newcomer, whose bot tends to visit this website more than DuckDuckGo and Google combined: Bing. Bing is a Microsoft search engine that is often underrated, but produces some great results, likely in direct competition with Google. While we cannot say for certain whether Bing has the same issues we saw with DuckDuckGo and Google, it is best that we do offer Bing the chance to search out our website. You, the reader, may also have a preference for which search engine you wish to use, and offering multiple choices is likely to discover an article you may be looking for or at least produce some results in which your article will show up in any of the major search engines, or our own native search feature.
Also, for those oldschoolers, Yahoo! search has also been added! Yahoo! search remains one of the oldest and longest running search engines in the history of the Internet and is still used by millions of people and has picked up many articles from Confessions of the Professions and is a great search engine to use for research purposes. Yahoo! search is very likely to be unbiased as well, picking up and giving a variety of search results. If all else fails, go with Yahoo!
Now you may use any of the five searches from Five Search Research to find what you are looking for on confessionsoftheprofessions.com and if you cannot find it on one search engine, there are four more opportunities to help you find what you are looking for. We hope this will resolve many issues with our contributors and their own fans and followers being able to find their articles on the website. For example, if I am one of your favorite authors on this website, you can search for “Matthew Gates” and any articles I have written will show up using the native search. We do not discount what Google and DuckDuck are trying to do, but it has come to our attention that we just cannot trust them to always deliver the best search results, no matter how much they claim to be the best. We will be relying solely on our own native search feature again.
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