After Google's Gemini was made available to the public, it took a mere twenty-four hours for someone to discover that chats were being shown in Google search results. In response to what seemed to be a leak, Google moved swiftly.

Google was only displaying three search results when the Google Gemini chats started to disappear early on Tuesday, February 13. The quantity of compromised Gemini conversations that appeared in the search results had decreased to simply one by the afternoon.

How Were the Gemini Chat Pages Made?

Gemini provides an option to link to a publically accessible version of a private conversation.

Private chats do not automatically result in web pages being created by Google. A link at the bottom of each chat allows users to create their own chat sites.

What Caused the Indexing of Gemini Chat Pages?

The chat pages were obviously crawled and indexed by Google because they forgot to include a robots.txt file in the root of the Gemini subdomain (gemini.google.com).

A robots.txt file is a web page file used to manage crawler activity. A publication can use directives established in the Robots.txt Protocol to prevent particular crawlers.

Two Methods for Finding and Indexing Private Chat Pages

• Somewhere there could be an open connection.
• The possibility that they were found via browser history connected from cookies is less likely, but still plausible.
• The likelihood of public links exists.

What Caused Chat Pages To Delete From Search Results?

But why did Google start removing chat pages entirely if there was a public link? Is there a rule in place at Google that tells the search crawler not to include web pages with public links in the /share/ subdirectory in the search index?

Views Into How Google and Bing Search Index information 

This is the truly exciting section for all you search engine nerds who are curious about how Google and Bing index information.

In contrast to Google search, the Microsoft Bing search index reacted differently to the Gemini content. Bing displayed only one result from the subdomain in the early hours of February 13, whereas Google continued to provide three search results. The content and quantity of the index seemed to be determined at random.

Why Did the Gemini Chat Pages Go Viral?

The following are the known facts:

Robots.txt was set up by Google on February 8th.

The pages from the gemini.google.com subdomain were indexed by both Google and Bing.

It's possible that links to the chats were found and then indexed by Google and Bing.

Despite the robots.txt file, the search engines index the content and started to discard them.

This brings up the original question of why these pages began to disappear from both Google and Bing search results. The idea that I have is that the Google Gemini chat sites (site:gemini.google.com/share/) are low quality web pages that are not relevant to display for long tail searches. These pages shouldn't even be shown in the search results because they aren't very helpful.