I don’t know if this is a Google or Taiwanese website issue, but I had trouble finding news stories that shouldn’t have been hard to find today.
Not a Google issue: I can’t find a search bar for the websites of either The China Post or The Taipei Times. That seems seriously weird. There’s just a really obvious search bar that I’m missing because of extreme sleep deprivation, right?
This seems more like a Google issue: I was trying to dig up information for this post, and had no luck whatsoever finding news posts with Google. For example, I googled “steakhouse restructured meat Taiwan”. On my computer (iMac, using Safari), Google tells me there are “About 71,000 results”, yet it’s only giving me two pages, and most of those results say “Missing: restructured.” The search does NOT turn up this article (Taipei Times), and it sure seems like it should.
I only found that Taipei Times article by looking at the date on a broken China Post link for a similar news story, and checking the Taipei Times archive for that same date. I couldn’t find a way to dig back in the archive on the China Post, which seems like a horrible thing for a newspaper to be missing.
Google’s results look different, with the dumb favicon format adding distraction but little useful - but is something deeper going on with the search as well? I’m surprised at how hard that search was.