>>Not really. The UT has always been a walled garden impenetrable to Google or other search engines. The site has never lent itself to deep linking which greatly diminished the value of what this rich resource could have been. All this knowledge - with only very limited exposure.
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>Deep links stop working after a few years even to sites which stayed where they were for 20+ years. Every now and then they feel the itch to revamp the looks, and this somehow requires redefining all the links. Even LE (nee UT) suffered from that syndrome at least once.
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>Kudos to you in that regard - things I bookmarked in, I'd say, 2008, are still where they were!

There's plenty of older content linked through search engines. If updates happen its not due to search engines but to sites changing their scheme and that's usually a failure on the part of the operator to not provide backlinks to that old content. There's no reason you can't have URL forwarding of some sort to provide old content at the new URLs.

The UTs problem is that it's not open and never was so content was never indexed. The only search you can do here is via limited search through the UT UI which while decent isn't anywhere as intuitive or flexible what you would get if the content was indexed through a search engine.

There's no doubt the UT has provided tons of value for all the years its been here - it's just that it could have provide a heck a lot more value if it hadn't been a walled garden (and probably would have made Michel more money by bringing in a lot more traffic) even if posting had been behind a pay wall.

+++ Rick ---