Searches are "polluted" by comments and usernames in right sidebar

[gjm11]

Suppose you are looking for a comment from Less Wrong. You remember that it's something X said to Y and contained words Z. So off you go to Google and search for X Y Z site:lesswrong.com. What you are likely to find is a load of pages that, when Google indexed them, had X,Y,Z in the right sidebar -- perhaps X and Y because of the "top contributors" section and Z because of the "recent comments" section.

But that right sidebar is generated dynamically and if you visit those pages now you will not find the comment you are looking for. (Google's cached versions don't include the sidebar content at all, which seems odd given that it's being indexed, but no matter.)

There are magic comments you can add to a page to stop it indexing portions that shouldn't be indexed. We should add those around the sidebar material.

(Other search engines aren't necessarily any better; at least Bing seems not to be. I don't know whether Bing has a similar mechanism, or for that matter whether it respects the Google magic.)

[vaniver]

Endorsed. Here's the link to the magic comments mentioned on LW.