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.
![](http://techtldr.com/wp-content/uploads/ddg.png)
I searched for the same thing on Bing and it was at the top as well.
![](http://techtldr.com/wp-content/uploads/bing.png)
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.
![](http://techtldr.com/wp-content/uploads/google.png)
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 🙂