After seeing how badly Google performed with site:jackyan.com, I wanted to get on record how it was with Lucire. I already knew it failed to pick up many PHP pages, preferring the static ones of HTML, but I didn’t realize just how bad it got. I’m pretty sure it’s worse now than even two weeks ago, when I spotted three PHP indices on p. 2 of the results for site:lucire.com. Now it’s down to two. Google just can’t handle PHP any more, it seems. (P.PS.: It was nine pages in September 2022.)
The age of the pages is better spread though; they’re not stuck in 2013 like so many of the site:jackyan.com top 10 were. But there are a bunch of 2004 pages in the top 10, pages that haven’t been linked for nearly two decades. Still, the rest are better spread, so that’s promising.
You may wonder why 1997 isn’t included. For those initial months of Lucire’s existence, it was hosted under our company’s domain. By 1998 I realized things were going well enough to splash out on its own domain.
Mojeek simply is more capable of handling HTML and PHP, ranking things based on relevance, as a search engine is supposed to do. There are a lot of later HTML articles on the third and fourth pages here for site:lucire.com, but PHP pages are visible in the top 25, and one appears at position 42.
If you believe PHP and HTML pages deserve equal coverage, and that it’s the content of the page that counts, then Mojeek is the search engine you should go for.
Out of curiosity, I thought I’d throw Bing in the mix. Yes, it is that bad, and that is all it can deliver (10 results!). But at least all but one are PHP!
PS.: It’s worth remembering that Google had more PHP pages in the top 50 back in September, so it’s unlikely to be anything related to these pages carrying more data (unless Google has changed its policies).
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