Search engine problems showing little to no results and strange responses

Yes, Mardee. I put in a search for Scrovegni Chapel, just tips from Rick, then I put in Padua, again not much. I was really surprised not thinking it could be a glitch.

Well, I'm glad it's not just me, Barbara. I've emailed the Webmaster to let him know.

I just searched "Mardee" and got one result. :-/

Hahahahaha!!!!

Although I did check that and it was a thread I responded to yesterday. It's really weird.

You're right... zero results for Heathrow.

oops

Yes,for 2 or 3 days

Yesterday morning when I tried several searches I kept getting either no results or the page with Rick on the floor. This lasted about an hour.

Today, I'm seeing the same as you. However, I do see Google results for "Rick Steves forum xxx".

I've never used the search on the forum, but Google searches are working fine.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/england+heathrow

Gerry, if I use the site specific search feature on Google, I'm coming up with forum results like you. But if I just key in random words about travel and rick steves, it shows no forum results.

That said, I just tried it again and now some results are showing up on Google. But not the usual number. Typically there would be dozens of pages to scroll through but I'm only finding 4. It's weird.

We'll wait for the venerable Webmaster to give us his words of wisdom.

I'll blame Cloudflare. It's always Cloudflare :)

Does the Search Engine result page look different, besides the missing posts?

I haven't searched in a while and not sure. If so, looks like they upgraded recently. And it's either a glitch or the engine is still indexing the past database. Maybe both?

Does the Search Engine result page look different, besides the missing posts?

A bit but that's from the recent upgrade they did. But I think that was about a month or so ago; although maybe there was another update more recently that they didn't mention. Other than that, it looks the same.

If they did the changes I'm vaguely noticing an appreciable time before this then... probably not.

I just searched on “Poland”, and there were no forum posts in the results.

Jean, exactly!

Now I've noticed something else.

I keyed in the word "London" to search and of course, would typically have gotten hundreds and hundreds of response. NO forum posts showed up; only the Tips and Articles. But the filters actually say there are some results in other places; e.g., Travel Forum (6), Radio Episodes (29), and so on. However, when you click on one of those link options, the message "No results for your search term! Please try again." pops up.

Weirdly, if I Google "oaxaca forum", my first post about traveling to Oaxaca is the second hit.

-- Mike Beebe

Ha ha, Mike, that is pretty bizarre! Maybe AI has taken over the forum and Google, and is tailoring the results to each of us. :-)

Yeah, it's definitely bonkers.

A lot of folks who can have taken some or all of this week off work (because July 4th is Friday). Hopefully the historically under-appreciated Search function won't have to wait until Monday for the Technical 2 x 4.

Yes, I just googled on "Rick Steves forum art" to see if Allan's post turned up and it DID, but saying that it was from two days ago, when I know that there are been several replies in the last two days and also just this morning. Wonder if that means the bad glitch thing occurred two days ago.

A lot of folks who can have taken some or all of this week off work (because July 4th is Friday). Hopefully the historically under-appreciated Search function won't have to wait until Monday for the Technical 2 x 4.

I don't know, David. I emailed Andrew and I know he sometimes checks his emails out of the office. But it might indeed have to wait. I remember the last update about a month or so ago, and there were some glitches then (although not like this), and it took them a few days to fix it.

I just did a search for " Isle-sur-la-Sorgue" and only the "Tips and Articles" by Rick popped up. No posts from forum members.

I noticed it yesterday when I searched for a couple of things.

I also emailed the webmaster yesterday when I had the same problem.

Until the Webmaster gets to it, a work-around:

When I googled with the tag that pins the search to a particular website:

=> "@ricksteves.com mardee" without the quotes

...the results went on and on. Add your own terms.

If you need to locate something before it's fixed.

edit: and if you go to (on Google screen) "Tools" you can choose various date ranges to narrow it down

edit2: don't know why that worked. As the Webmaster said, the correct syntax for a search of the Rick Steves site is "site:" syntax. When I look on the web I find reports of a google search with "@twitter" to search the twitter site and is reported using that symbol for searching "Social Sites". Perhaps google considered Rick Steves to be a Social Site? Doesn't matter.

Hi everyone,

I'm simultaneously thrilled to know that so many of you use the search engine on our site and apologetic for the issues. I didn't even know it was "underrated." ;)

As some of you know already, the system was entirely down as of the evening of July 1 and we brought it back up midday July 2. However, some of the indexes (the array of search results) have not yet been recovered, hence the lacking set of results you're seeing. We've been working on recovering this, and we're hopeful to have it back today.

In the meantime, you can use Google to narrow any search result to just our forum. For example, if you want to search for "paris orsay", you'd put this into Google's search engine:

paris orsay site:community.ricksteves.com

It is the heat. It causes the forum to warp.
No, I am not a techie, it just sounded good.

Thank you, Andrew! I wasn’t on the forum that evening so I wasn’t aware of the outage but that makes sense. I appreciate you letting us know what the problem is.

I hope this doesn’t affect you and your staff’s holiday plans. We can live without the search engine for a few days. :-)

Just searched Edinburgh and got no results!

I’m sure the lovely web-techies are on it.

You get what you pay for. Lol

I just searched "Mardee" and got one result.

of course. There IS only ONE Mardee!!!

Aw, Nigel! Although that's probably a good thing. ;-)

Search seems to be back.

Now there are 1,295 Mardees. :)

Bonus for the Webmaster!

That's a lot of Mardees!

Weird. I repeated my mistaken "@RickSteves.com mardee" (wo quotes) Google search and got just over 10 pages of Google hits. I did select "Use Verbatim" when it wanted to misspell her name.

Went to the final "10th" page at the bottom of the results page, just as a sample, and they were all Mardee posts. Scanned a couple of other "pages" and they were all Mardee posts. No idea why that worked as much as it did though the count certainly seems different than the Webmaster's. Perhaps Google is only reporting a more recent batch. No idea. I had a vague memory of being able to specify something like that with google when I tried it and when I got all the hits I thought it worked. Not worth figuring it out any more.

No wonder!
Starting to think I was losing it!

Search seems to be back. Now there are 1,295 Mardees. :)

Just think of the fun you'll have monitoring all those Mardees, Andrew!!!

Seriously, thank you for fixing it! I use that search engine a lot and I was so frustrated this morning!