9/12/15

Original Poster

Eran Rosenthal

Indexing problem for articles in Wikipedia containing ' char

Articles in Hebrew Wikipedia that contain ' character in their name aren't indexed by Google.
For example: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%92'%D7%9C%D7%94_%D7%A4%D7%9C%D7%96%D7%A0%D7%A1

What could be the problem?

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All Replies (9)

9/13/15

Gaieus

Hi Eran,

That's the "yod" character, isn't it? I wonder if it is (somehow) replaced by a "simple" apostrophe character (as it seems from the transcript of the URL).

9/13/15

Original Poster

Eran Rosenthal

It seems to be a issue with apostrophe character (') - new pages that contain this character in their title aren't indexed other. Other examples are:
* https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%94_%D7%91%D7%96'%D7%96'%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%A1%D7%A7%D7%99 (created at 30 August 2015)
* https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%92'%D7%A8%D7%9E%D7%99_%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9F (create as 14 August 2015)

This is wide issue and there are many more such examples. Taking a sample sentence from the above links doesn't yield any result.

9/13/15

Original Poster

Eran Rosenthal

See also cross post in Wikimedia bug tracker: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T112425

* It seems to be issue specific for Google and Baidu (which may copy Google results?) but Bing sometimes do yield results

* It isn't specific to Hebrew, examples from English Wikipedia are:
** https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Conference_USA_Men%27s_Soccer_Freshman_of_the_Year
** https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Holland%27s_Next_Top_Model_%28cycle_8%29

9/13/15

Gaieus

It1s all right that a URL can hardly be properly indexed with special characters in it (therefore one should never use them in URL's; directory paths/names or file names) but regarding the Hebrew text, there should not be an apostrophe there so I guess it's a mismatch of characters. Or this particular character was replaced by an apostrophe.

This character: י should not be replaced by an apostrophe: '.

9/13/15

Original Poster

Eran Rosenthal

* This is not issue in Hebrew, for example in English "Conference USA Men's Soccer Freshman of the Year" in English Wikipedia

* Search indexes should handle and do handle apostrophe properly, this is a new regression from the last month or so. (older pages containing apostrophe are indexed properly)

* (Though this isn't relevant to this issue) Yud and apostrophe are different characters. In Hebrew apostrophe is widely used for transcribing English names containing J (e.g Jon is "ג'ון"). Since readers here aren't familiar with Hebrew which is totally OK let's talk use the English examples above.

9/13/15

Gaieus

Fine, my Hebrew is also rusty nowadays. Only first I thought it was particular to that specific URL you mentioned first.

I have been looking high and low now but could not figure out any definitive solution to the issue.

This page is indexed for instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland%27s_Next_Top_Model

But the other one (with just some addedd parts in the RL in brackets - again, some bad practice IMO) is not (as you mentioned of course):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland%27s_Next_Top_Model_(cycle_8)

So it's not particularly the apostrophe itself I believe which makes these (new?) URL's hard to index.

9/14/15

Original Poster

Eran Rosenthal

I still don't understand why new URLs with apostrophe aren't indexed while older are included in the index. This seems to be a new bug introduced in the last month or so.

10/5/15

Original Poster

Eran Rosenthal

where can I post a bug to Google search engine? pages with apostrophe character in their title are consistently not indexe.

10/5/15

John Mueller

Thanks for posting, Eran -- I'll double-check with the team here.

Cheers

John

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Indexing problem for articles in Wikipedia containing ' char

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