There’s new behaviour from Google Custom Search, of relevance to Google CSE curators. In the dashboard, one can no longer edit a URL in place (for instance, make a simple updating of a URL from http:// to https:// ) and then save it to update it in the index. Doing this deletes the URL from the index without any warning. If you didn’t keep a backup copy of that URL pattern, you’ve lost it.

The behaviour is so remarkable and abrupt that I think perhaps it’s a temporary glitch. But for now, a wary CSE curator needs to:

1) open the indexed URL in the CSE then copy / paste it to Notepad
2) manually delete it from the URL base
3) make the corrections to the URL in Notepad
4) then paste the URL back into the CSE index, as if it were a fresh URL.

Backing up one’s CSE index (aka ‘annotations’) as .xml is probably also advisable, if glitches are indeed getting into the system.