(How) can I ask Google Search to crawl a specific URL on a website I don't maintain?

Question

This question on Meta Stack Exchange asks whether crawler visits count towards the 'number of views' of a Stack Exchange question (that determines the 'people reached' statistic on your profile).

Google returns a lot of results about indexing URLs but they apply (solely?) when you're the administrator of the website. As a consumer, can I ask Google Search to index/crawl a specific URL, for instance a specific Stack Exchange question?

I'm looking for something like the Wayback Machine homepage where you can just submit a URL in a form.

Answer 1

From the OP's question

As a consumer, can I ask Google Search to index/crawl a specific URL, for instance a specific Stack Exchange question?

There use to be a help article on the Google (Search) Help Center about how to ask google to add content to Google that pointed to another help article on the Webmasters Tools (now Search Console) Help Center that referred a tool to submit content's URL to be indexed and to request to update the cached version of an already indexed content. This tool could be used by site owners and "consumers".

Unfortunately, AFAIK, this tool isn't available anymore, so I think that the best bet for "consumers" to get some content to be indexed/crawled by Google is to contact the webmaster of the content that they want to be indexed/crawled.

Another alternative is to create a Google custom search engine.