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Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

The Devil's rummaging through his closet for some mittens.

This comment made me LOL. Thank you, that's pretty funny.

I was curious if this was a saying I'd never heard of or if you just came up with it. Seems you just came up with this?

What's amazing is that Google already has this HN post indexed and you're already the first hit for the phrase. And even weirder, Google says that they (currently) indexed it 56 minutes ago, when HN reports you posted it 23 minutes ago. Google is now apparently predicting the future 33 minutes in advance.

https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Devil%27s+rummaging+thro...

Get a grip old chap and think through the old saw: "... when Hell freezes over", meaning [it] will never happen. There are plenty of riffs on that meme, including devilish hand protection strategies.

Google is a boring old replayer of trite old stuff and quite right too - that's what it does! I suspect it also reads HN on a tight loop - many of the locals there are also from this parish.

I suspect even the eye of Sauron doom scrolls HN ...

> even weirder, Google says that they (currently) indexed it 56 minutes ago, when HN reports you posted it 23 minutes ago. Google is now apparently predicting the future 33 minutes in advance.

One interpretation is that Google is lying about the indexing time.

But it seems more likely in this case that they're reporting the indexing time of the page they link to ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458756 ), rather than the indexing time of the comment you're responding to ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33459157 , which can only have been indexed half an hour ago).

In other words, they updated their cache of the page content without refreshing the indexing timestamp.

Yeah, they don't seem to make any guarantees at all about the date being displayed next to the search result... I'm too lazy to check the page source here right now on which meta fields are updated with comments, but this is what Google says about how they determine the date:

> Google determines a date using a variety of factors, including but not limited to: any prominent date listed on the page itself or dates provided by the publisher through structured markup.

> Google doesn't depend on one single factor because all of them can be prone to issues. Publishers may not always provide a clear visible date. Sometimes, structured data may be lacking or may not be adjusted to the correct time zone. That's why our systems look at several factors to come up with what we consider to be our best estimate of when a page was published or significantly updated.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/03/help-googl...

Wouldn't that just be because OP's comment appeared on the article, which was posted ~1h ago, and the Google result link is to the article, not the comment directly, hence has the earlier timestamp?

It's still a bit off; Google's index clearly contains content that wasn't present on the page at the "time of indexing".

Whatever content appeared on the page after Google indexed it is something Google shouldn't know about.

Googles indexing defers javascript execution. If comments are loaded via JS, they'll appear on the index with the timestamp the page was fetched, not the time its script was executed.

HN uses notoriously scant amounts of JS, and not at all for comments, so this doesn't explain the puzzle of odd indexing behavior.

Ah yes, OK. My bad. That definitely sets the world back to normal then.

> I was curious if this was a saying I'd never heard of or if you just came up with it. Seems you just came up with this?

It's just a variation on similar sayings like "the devil's putting on ice skates".

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