GayVN Awards redirects 

Thanks for your help in deleting the pages that were merged. However, I'm disappointed that the redirects weren't deleted, regardless of how "cheap" they are. 

I can't find anything that says redirects have to be kept in the case of merging a page. (Which would make sense in most cases, I'm sure, but not when the name of the merged page is not one that someone would likely search for.) I can, however, find support for deleting them. Wikipedia:Redirect#When should we delete a redirect?, item 1. states, "The redirect page makes it unreasonably difficult for users to locate similarly named articles via the search engine."

I believe that leaving the redirects meets this guideline. Here's the top of the results list when searching for "gayvn", in order of appearance. There are 51 results listed. Redirects are marked (R); correct pages are bolded. Non-existent pages are italicized.

GAYVN Awards (R) capitalization - keep; is useful

GayVN awards (R) capitalization - keep; is useful

GayVN Award (R) Singular rather than plural - keep; is useful

GayVN Awards Article page

2001 GayVN Awards (R)

Talk: GayVN Awards Talk page

2003 GayVN Awards (R)

1998 GayVN Awards (R)

2004 GayVN Awards (R)

2002 GayVN Awards: Page is listed but doesn't exist, so results in a "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" page being displayed.

2005 GayVN Awards (R)

2000 GayVN Awards (R)

2006 GayVN Awards (R)

1st GayVN Awards (1999) (R)

2nd GayVN Awards (R)

6th GayVN Awards (R)

4th GayVN Awards: Page is listed but doesn't exist, so results in a "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" page being displayed.

3rd GayVN Awards (R)

1st GayVN Awards (R): Redirects to 1998 GayVN Awards (R) (double redirect)

5th GayVN Awards (R)

Arabesque (gay film)

Wilfried Knight

Brice Ebson

and others ...

Having to slog through 15 extraneous "hits" for non-useful redirect pages seems unreasonable to me; it's nearly a third of the search results. The redirects aren't useful as they are too specific to be considered likely search phrases.

User:24.167.138.84 may exist, but 24.167.138.84 is a volatile IP address. Keeping a comment directed at a particular user of a volatile IP address that may never be used by that particular user again, about a page that has been merged/deleted, seems needless. While equally useless, for some reason he doesn't show up in the search list. (More evidence that there's something wrong with the index.)

User:Overdrive10/Kent Larson and User:Overdrive10/Chris Steele show up further down on the list as well; neither of these pages contains any reference to GayVN (they're both blank); I'm sure they did in the past as they were probably sandboxes for articles. However, there has been no activity on either page since 16 June. 

User:Fabartus/Sandbox also shows up in the search results but doesn't mention GayVN anywhere on that page; nor has s/he done so since 13 April. That entry appears to be part of a copy and paste of another user's contributions log with comments, and was created by a user with an IP address (most likely Fabartus's, however).

In these cases and the case of the two pages listed above that don't actually exist but are being returned as part of the search results, I think there's an obvious "glitch" somewhere - apparently in the search engine indexing. Is it not being refreshed on a regular basis? I thought it happened every 24 hours.

Any road, it would be nice to have the 15 redirect pages removed and their entries in the search results eliminated (and I'm not sure that the former results in the latter). Equally desirable would be to have the search index updated to reflect the non-existence of pages. Is that something that you can do, or know to whom a request should be made to do so?

Any chance of some further assistance here?

Thanks.— talk