in the right hand menu:
Why, when searching the above as described, do I get 2 entries but neither are observations?
There are actually 6 observations that turned up when Mags reminded me of this one that I find I actually agreed to:
and of course shows all the others in the species carousel. Something very bizarre is going on.
Unfortunately this is down to Google and their constantly changing methods. We have spent a very large amont of time trying to get this to work many times since ispot was redone and the internal search lost. It seems searching and getting your results high up in what google returns is very lucrative business so simply following the instructions without all sorts of tricks does not work.
I hadn’t appreciated that it was a Google search - there is no indication of this in the righthand menu I used. Google is mentioned at the very bottom of the results page but it’s not obviously helpful and isn’t.
Quite unreliable when I expected it to search iSpot’s own observations database and it doesn’t.
I hadn’t realised that either but it does explain the issues i’ve experienced with the search results.
Just tried a search. All results gave 13 entries; identifications gave 23 entries. Obviously there’s something off. Going directly to Google says about 45 results, of which it offers 11. Asking for the additional similar results says about 30 results, of which it offers 12.
DuckDuckGo gives more results, but they are all from the forum, and there are a lot of false positives included. Bing is similar.
Search became monitised several years ago so now trying to explain anything is almost impossible. we have done exactly what Google said in its instructions many times and still hopeless results so clearly there is a lot beyond what it actually says. I gave up with google many years ago on my website for just this reason and that it constantly changed what it required.
Can’t remember the current reason why we don’t have our own internal search, suspect it may be a combination of being tricky to set up on a site such as ispot and requiring a lot of resources to run well.
I don’t think it ought to be hard (software wise) to set up an internal search, but I can’t speak as to hardware demands.
