Update 02/18/2018: – Expected search result is back on Google. Perhaps it was just a bug after all.
I use AngularJS (aka Angular 1) in my daily work. When I need to look up documentation for something specific, I just search for it on Google. At least I used to do that. Few days ago I noticed that this approach was no longer working.
For example today I wanted to look up behavior of $watchGroup method and did not see any any official Angular documentation in the search result. I tried the same search on Duck Duck Go and saw the expected page as their first result.
I searched for the same thing on Bing and it was at the top as well.
I repeated my search on Google and noticed a link to the official documentation all the way at the bottom. But instead of linking to the specific page it was linking to the top level domain instead.
At the same time I am not sure what to make out of these search results. Is this just a bug or something that is being done by Google on purpose? Angular team has previously stated that traffic to Angular 1 and Angular 2 sites will serve as an indicated when they should End of Life Angular 1. Obviously, Angular 1 site will receive a lot less traffic if it’s no longer showing up in Google search results.
This observation further solidified my opinion that It’s NOT OK to Still Use Angular 1 in 2018. I will also have to switch my dev browser to Duck Duck Go, until all our apps are migrated to React 🙂