Google and DuckDuckGo
An example of very different results for exactly the same search
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
When I was first posting on Substack, and when the first articles had had a few dozen views, I tried searching online for the Substack pages. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn’t find links to them anywhere near the top of the results of even quite specific searches.
Searching for “dear church leaders substack”
[Update (August 2024): Google does now find the Dear Church Leaders Substack, but only if the word “substack” is typed along with “dear church leaders”; searching Google for “dear church leaders” alone gives no results in the top 100, whereas the same query on DuckDuckGo yields 3 results in the top 10]
Three months on, and thousands of views later, I recently tried again. I typed “dear church leaders substack” into a couple of well-known search engines.
Google
Here are the top results from Google:
I found no hits for the Dear Church Leaders Substack in the first hundred results from Google (after which I stopped scrolling)…
DuckDuckGo
Here are the top results from DuckDuckGo:
Hmm. Compare and contrast…
See how it works yet…?
Searching for “the big reveal substack”
[Update (July 2024): Google does now find the The Big Reveal Substack]
Interestingly, I found similar results for The Big Reveal, which is essentially a book on Christian apologetics, finished in 2018, with no links to anything that has happened in the past five years:
This is, of course, the tip of a very large iceberg.
Dear Church Leaders homepage (or via Substack, or e.g. DuckDuckGo, but not Google for some reason)
The Big Reveal — Christianity carefully considered (which can also be found via Substack, or e.g. DuckDuckGo, but not Google)