Maybe the google servers are region-specific and/or out of sync? Are you outside the U.S.?

I'm in Silicon Valley, not too far from Google headquarters. Where are you?

Anyway, I've seen this sort of thing before, which is why I don't rely on Google's archive for completeness.

Are you sure? The fifth one on my search list is telicthoughts.com/more-convergence/ — here is the cache. My list looks the same as yours, except you are missing that link. I have six hits in all.

Maybe the google servers are region-specific and/or out of sync? Are you outside the U.S.?

Huh? It's the fifth one down in the list.

Frostman,

Are you sure? When I click on your search link, I get listings for the following pages:

telicthoughts.com/front-loading-and-the-urmetazoan/ telicthoughts.com/death-of-a-popular-anti-id-argument/ telicthoughts.com/front-loading-with-homeodomains/
telicthoughts.com/
telicthoughts.com/misconceptions-about-front-loading/

This one is not on the list:
telicthoughts.com/more-convergence/

The problem is that Google's archive is not complete. For example, a Google search for "wnt site:telicthoughts.com" misses this comment completely.

Huh? It's the fifth one down in the list.

If there were some unreachable pages from the main page then it's possible those wouldn't show in google, provided nobody on the Net links to them. But those wouldn't be found by crawler client like wget either.

The google search syntax is quite flexible; for example see here and here. It's hard to imagine a case where that would be inadequate, unless you need regexps or something. What is the case you have in mind? Just curious.

The problem is that Google's archive is not complete. For example, a Google search for "wnt site:telicthoughts.com" misses this comment completely.

Second, I'm used to setting up complicated searches that can't be done using Google's search tool. Having a local archive means I can use the tool(s) of my choice for doing the searching, which saves a huge amount of time.

Mike asks:

You archive the entire blog? Why do you do that?

A better question is "why not?" It's automatic, so it doesn't require any extra work on my part. It doesn't use any more bandwidth, because new pages get archived automatically as I browse them. And it only consumes about 100 MB of space, which is a fraction of a percent of the free space on my hard drive.

Why wouldn't I do it?

You could even replace the current search function on the front page with a google version, which would work by appending "site:telicthoughts.com" to the search terms and sending them to google.

Of course the downside is the lag between google crawls, but they are getting shorter nowadays. telicthoughts.com was archived yesterday.

Mike, the solution is to archive all of TT on your hard drive where you can search it to your heart's content without relying on WordPress. There are lots of tools out there that enable you to do the archiving and the searching painlessly. I'm surprised you haven't thought of this.

You archive the entire blog? Why do you do that?

But what will you say when they ask you if, and when, you read Consilience?

What will you say if they ask you what scientism is ?

I have no idea why you think I'm at all humiliated, in fact, this is now one of my favorite threads.

Good. I hope you'll recommend it to all of your friends.

But what will you say when they ask you if, and when, you read Consilience?