Finding comments on LW is more painful than it should be because sometimes this happens:

• You remember that X replied to Y saying something with words Z in.
• You put something like <<X Y Z site:lesswrong.com>> into Google (directly or via the "Google custom search" in the right sidebar.)
• You get back a whole lot of pages, but
  • they all contain X and Y because of the top-contributors or recent-comments sections of the right sidebar;
  • they all contain Z because of the recent-comments section of the right sidebar.
• None of those pages now contains either the comment in question or a link to it.
• Using the "cached" link from the search results doesn't help, because the right sidebar is generated dynamically and is simply absent from the cached pages.
  • So how come they're found by the search? Beats me.

Here's a typical example; it happens to use only Z (I picked one of my comments from a couple of weeks ago) but including X and Y seldom helps.

I just tried the equivalent search in Bing and the results were more satisfactory, but only because the comment in question happened to appear fairly near the top of the overview page for the user I was replying to. I would guess that Bing isn't actually systematically better for these searches, but I haven't tested.

Does anyone know a good workaround for this problem?

Is there a way to make the dynamically-generated sidebar stuff on LW pages invisible to Google's crawler? It looks like there is. Should I file an issue on GitHub?