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Why did ProtonMail vanish from Google search results for months?

345 points by based2 10y ago

arkadiyt 10y ago
Direct link to Protonmail's blog post: https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/ https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/
dandare 10y ago
Could you in theory sue Google for (intentionally or not) discriminating against you in the search results? Just in theory.
- Kimm0n0 10y ago
  Leave that to the EU Commission. They have been look for å case like this for years.
  - Steve_Moneytis 10y ago
    btw "EU commission" might soon not appear in Google search results anymore...
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Google search results might not appear in the EU anymore, if Google keeps responding the way they have been.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Indeed. Or Google might be broken up – there’s also antitrust cases against them in the US. With more than half of the population using them, and them holding > 90% in multiple such markets, they fall into the category of monopoly that automatically becomes a public utility – they’re supposed to be just a dumb pipe.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  I'm sure Google would be happy with that because as in all such cases where some blog claims that Google dropped them down the memory hole for absolutely no reason whatsoever, we don't ever hear Google's side of the story. Google has nothing to gain from commenting. But in court they would have a reason to respond, and then we'd find out exactly what kind of malware these guys were hosting, or whatever.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    "Google has nothing to gain from commenting." Defusing a court case would seem helpful. Explaining to those worried by this might be good. Acknowledging you screwed up, fixing it and publicly stating you will do better (then doing better) can actually boost the way a company is seen.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  In theory, one can sue Google (or any other party) for any reason whatsoever -- no matter how absurd or "out there". IANAL but I doubt they'd get very far. What would their actual argument even be? Google isn't obligated to include every web site in existence in their index.
  - awqrre 10y ago
    Seeing how Google have a near monopoly on Search, perhaps they should be required to... or at least be required not to remove search results of already-indexed legitimate websites.
    - kyrra 10y ago
      How does one create such a list? How do you distinguish domains that have gone rogue (either ones that were legit then went bad. Or if the domain expired or was sold to a nefarious person)? I believe in this case protonmail was hit by an algorithm based derank (not a manual action). What causes it is anyone's guess. But something series of events hurt their ranking. Its also important to note that PM was NOT delisted. They still were getting traffic from Google, they were just deranked.
  - morganvachon 10y ago
    > Google isn't obligated to include every web site in existence in their index. No, but to have a competing product appear highly ranked at first, then drop off their search engine entirely and not return until there is a public outcry, screams of anti-competitive action on Google's part[1]. That said, I don't think a lawsuit would get very far either. I'm just saying the whole affair is fishy. [1] Or, if you want to go tin-foil-hat with it, perhaps a certain government told Google it didn't want people to know about a secure email startup that resides in a country that is known for upholding privacy rights. I don't buy that one myself but I've seen it bandied about in the past in similar cases.
simosx 10y ago
The article does not provide an answer and simply poses the question. The fact that Google does not disclose any useful information makes it difficult to figure out what really happened.
tptacek 10y ago
Google has plausible webmail competitors. "ProtonMail" is not one of them. Can someone provide an explanation of why they think Google would elevate this particular random email provider in the media by penalizing their search results?
- quickben 10y ago
  Wouldn't it be simpler explanation that they just rank down everything with mail in the name?
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Is that happening to FastMail?
    - brongondwana 10y ago
      Nah, we come up number 2 for a search for "reliable email" when I'm logged in and number 5 when I'm logged out - which sounds bad, but the stuff about it is all questions about how reliable email delivery is. Fair enough. We don't even rate a mention for "professional email" because it's all about how to not come across like a n00b when writing emails. (interestingly, bing search for professional email has an ad for Google's email above the search results)
      - tptacek 10y ago
        FastMail, unlike ProtonMail, actually has traction. Why is Google supposedly penalizing ProtonMail, but not FastMail?
        quickben 10y ago
        Eh, we are entering an area of speculation. The right answer is 'only google knows', but since you are asking twice this question, let me try to take a wild guess: - Google, an advertising company, benefits from having access to the plaintext of people's messages. They can advertise this as 'secure' but only for the comm channel. - Proton mail, advertises itself as: "ProtonMail is the world's largest secure email service, developed by CERN and MIT scientists. We are open source and protected by Swiss privacy law.", featuring end to end encryption, anonymous email, mobile clients etc. - Fastmail: "Secure, reliable email hosting for businesses, families and professionals. Premium email with no ads, excellent spam protection and rapid personal support." If I'm a product manager of GMail, I'd be more scared from Proton mail than FastMail. In fact, anything featuring end-to-end encryption will be approached with negativity, because then GMail can't target ads, which are the main cash cow for google.
discordianfish 10y ago
I can't imaging they would do that intentionally and on their own will. It's too obvious and just provides more arguments for the anti-trust complaint.
- quickben 10y ago
  What, like this one? http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/19/google-could-face-3-separate-antitrust-cases-eu-competition-chief.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/19/google-could-face-3-separate-...
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  Google has already been getting away with giving unfair priority and treatment to their own properties for years. Why not take the next step and just start outright hiding competitors?
  - frogpelt 10y ago
    Google is not required to provide you search results. And they should be expected to market their own products. To expect otherwise is foolish.
    - cooper12 10y ago
      It's a different story when they're the most popular search engine. They have the power to control what others see and unfairly prioritizing their services disadvantages competitors, a big no-no for such a big company like Google. Also, to many people, Google is the internet. Everyone I know just types stuff into the search bar to get where they want to go, not foo.com. If you don't show up in the first page of the Google search results, you don't exist.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > Google is not required to provide you search results. Yes, they are, if they want to access the market at all, they have to provide results to everyone, and can’t discriminate. > And they should be expected to market their own products. No. They have > 90% of the market, which is used by > 50% of the population, meaning they’re automatically a public utility, and can not provide any positive or negative discrimination to their own or other services. Any treatment has to be completely fair and equal, and if their own services can get integration, so any competitors have to be able to do. (For a fair price, of course).
mooman219 10y ago
Let's not forget protonmail.com was previously protonmail.ch. Moving domains can make a tremendously negative impact on search engine rankings. The "fixed" comment could have been properly assigning protonmail.com with the ranking data for protonmail.ch. This detail was in the previous HN post, but looks to be left out of this one for some reason... Disclaimer: This is speculation. Take both this article and my post with a grain of salt.
- joelrunyon 10y ago
  > Moving domains can make a tremendously negative impact on search engine rankings. Only if you do it wrong. If you do it write, there should be negligible impact.
  - mooman219 10y ago
    We don't actually know what happened which is the hard part. They could have done it wrong, or they could have done it right but a bug caused it to be filtered in google search. Maybe some automated process deemed the new side as fraudulent. Last thing anyone wants is a new site with a similar domain stealing SEO. Moving domains always comes with its risks.
    - kleigenfreude 10y ago
      I think that Google removed it from their results intentionally. Google has the ability to restrict results, and for it to be weighted so highly after they "fixed" it, and because they gave no indication of what was wrong, I think the "fix" was to remove it from the blacklist. However, it doesn't change that I use Gmail and will continue to use it. It's still the better product for the money (free).
      - stephengillie 10y ago
        The removal and fix need not have been so blatant - a breaking change for some sites might have been prioritized, and the fix to that break may have had other work pushed ahead of it. There doesn't need to be an explicit blocklist or clearlist in play to make some customers more important.
jklinger410 10y ago
Google often-times makes severe algorithm changes. There is an SEO company called MOZ that keeps track of these. If you see right around the same time that ProtonMail suffered a disruption of rankings they were in the middle of a huge update (https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change). This was May 10th of this year. I am referencing the official ProtonMail blog post (https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/ https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/) linked by another commenter in this thread. I also want to say I'm not a Google employee and have no vested interest in the authenticity in their algorithm. It is very fishy that according to PM they contacted a Google rep via twitter and got a "we fixed something" response from them. As an SEO person, my opinion is this: As an encrypted email service ProtonMail probably gets a lot of foreign and otherwise "undesirable" (or deplorable ;) ) links in the eyes of Google. Google lately has been doing a lot of algorithmic changes to actively sift these types of links out of consideration when ranking sites or dampening them severely. My guess is that Google was basically penalizing PM for the links they were getting without notifying them via Webmaster Tools. Whether or not there was a manual penalty involved that they weren't notified about also adds a little bit of shadiness. Maybe Google thought PM was trying to game the algorithm or at the very least many of the links they were getting were of a spammy nature and they ran a penalty on them. The redirect from them changing a domain in the past can also compound issues with Google. Sometimes they consider redirects spammy depending on what kind of redirect is in place. Without more info it does seem weird that they would "fix" something not only without warning them in the first place but not explaining it afterwards? Most web admins have to use what's called a "disavow" list to remove the penalized links but apparently their rep seemed to do this for them. Probably due to the anti-trusty viral nature of the complaint? I don't know what SERP tracker PM is using for these stats. Barring there were no errors in that system, they can trace the lack of rankings to a lack of organic traffic, and they were given no reasoning to the penalty or what was going on... They may want to hire a lawyer and start an anti-trust suit on Google. This is very fishy without any official information from Google.
- walshemj 10y ago
  Thats interesting it would be interesting to look at there link profile - getting out of a link penalty is hard it took me over a year to get on client out of one.
joering2 10y ago
What a coincident; I was just wondering when will Proton popup on HN to share my experience. I must say I don't think they even have customer support. I emailed them and opened tickets multitude times with serious questions (looking into moving entire enterprise with 100+ email addresses) but I guess I was neither their type of client nor they simply don't have customer support at all! This issue turned me off and against them entirely; sorry.
- blunte 10y ago
  I have had good support from them. Maybe it's because I'm a paying customer? What they are doing, both from the backend side and the multiple clients side, is a lot. Chances are they are just really busy with the number of employees they have.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
londons_explore 10y ago
If this post weren't full of vague legal risks for Google, you would likley get a (private) explanation of the cause. As it is now, no employee would risk such communication for fear of it being used against them in an anti trust case, even if it were well meaning. Anti trust cases are worth billions, and a single email saying "we messed up because your URL contained an apostrophe and that caused a bug in our crawler" might well tip the case against Google to a non technical judge or jury.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kuschku 10y ago
  If they say nothing, it’s even more likely to be used against them. And I personally think that’s actually good. Open all the antitrust cases against Google at once, so it can be broken up.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Google has had many chances to privately communicate with ProtonMail before they wrote this blog.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
A little suspicious, but lacking hard evidence of trying to hurt competition, I choose to give Google the benefit of the doubt here. I have had a ProtonMail account for a few years and the system keeps getting better. The one feature lacking, and keeping me from using it as a primary email service, is not being able to backup my emails locally. I think that is on their TODO list.
- fgpwd 10y ago
  They also don't have 2-factor authentication yet.
  - vabmit 10y ago
    2fa is being tested on the internal development site, now.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vabmit 10y ago
  Code allowing external access (IMAP etc) to mailboxes that would allow you to download all your mail is in development now. Some IMAP clients (cough Microsoft cough) have "interesting" ways of interpreting/implementing the RFCs. So, it is taking somewhat longer than expected.
n1000 10y ago
> ProtonMail tracked this situation through Spring 2016, trying to get in touch with Google to query why it had vanished from search results — and initially having no luck getting a response. It only eventually got an acknowledgment of the complaint in August after it had tweeted at Google staff. Why is it that large companies like Apple and Google are so hard to reach? Remember the story of the Dash iOS app developer that got kicked out of the store. He also practically was unable to reach anyone.
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  To be fair what that guy originally said and what happened were two different things. Apple contacted him before they shut down his account. At least that's what Apple said... http://www.loopinsight.com/2016/10/10/apple-responds-to-dash-controversy-with-proof/ http://www.loopinsight.com/2016/10/10/apple-responds-to-dash...
  - pedro2 10y ago
    The author says that's not true. He has phone call recording proving he is right: https://blog.kapeli.com/dash-and-apple-my-side-of-the-story https://blog.kapeli.com/dash-and-apple-my-side-of-the-story
    - matt4077 10y ago
      He has a phone recording of how he screws himself, by recording a phone call and trying to escalate a situation that Apple was trying to fix. He's not in the App Store today, because just posting that call without consent shows he can't be trusted. They may have tried to contact him at the address of the second account, which was spamming the store and may or may not have been him.
      - wishinghand 10y ago
        Is the developer from Dash based in the USA? Does two party consent cross international lines? He may not have the concept of not posting a phone conversation because it's a legally allowed thing and he didn't think to check what was the legal norm in Palo Alto.
ComodoHacker 10y ago
In case anyone interested, here are my field test results for "encrypted email", obtained today: Google DuckDuckGo Yahoo Proton Mail 1 16 - Tutanota 7 20 - Gmail - 10 1 (G Suite) "-" means no appearance up to and including second page. Ranking excludes sponsored links.
vladimir-y 10y ago
Has ProtonMail become a really secure? Since when I last time checked web client I noticed that PGP keys are being passed over the internet when you do login (private key), which doesn't look like a true end-to-end encryption since private key should be kept locally and never be passed over the internet. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm note very well versed in the encryption matters.
- tinodotim 10y ago
  The private key is encrypted using your mailbox password (a 2nd password, not the login password) and that is not stored on their servers. So they only store and pass the private key encrypted. So it should be secure enough but for sure, the implementation is still not perfect at all, especially if you want to communicate with non-protonmail users.
  - vladimir-y 10y ago
    > So they only store and pass the private key encrypted. I remember I was able to get key passed through the network in the not encrypted form, I was looking into the network tab of the browser's dev console. When you do login look at the response of the https://mail.protonmail.com/api/auth https://mail.protonmail.com/api/auth POST query.
SagelyGuru 10y ago
I have every sympathy with ProtonMail. Google's behaviour in this certainly looks highly suspect. However, in general, I am not a fan of regulation. I wonder if this problem could not be better fixed by an open source search engine "assistant" that simply polls several existing (competing) search engines? Perhaps implemented as a browser plugin? I base this suggestion on the assumption that not all the usual search engine providers will have the same conflicts of interest. More specifically, in this case, they are not all email providers themselves. For the same reason I trust more the search engine providers who have not added to it all kinds of other business interests. Any thoughts on that? Has anyone tried it?
- gnud 10y ago
  What search engines are not email providers?
  - SagelyGuru 10y ago
    DuckDuckGo?
    - Nullabillity 10y ago
      DDG mostly relies on the APIs of other search vendors, who do have email services.
  - rvern 10y ago
    Qwant does its own crawling and does not provide email.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant
- wiml 10y ago
  There were a good many of those in the early '00s before Google rose to dominance. Either integrated into the browser or "meta-search engines" which simply merged the results from a number of other search engines.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
babuskov 10y ago
It looks like a net win for PM. If you look at the graph, before disappearing they had struggled for position and after the fix they are #1. Plus they get publicity like this TC article.
throwawaydev7 10y ago
Anecdata: At a conference a couple of years ago I was talking on-stage about my product. It's a direct competitor to Google in an area that they don't do very well (quite often, comically badly), and my customers are people who care about getting really good results in this area. I made a couple of joking quips about the poor quality of the Google product during this presentation and moved on. Two days later my product completely vanished from the Google rankings. No cause that I could think of; I wasn't doing any questionable SEO or other manipulation at the time. I later found out there were Google people at the conference, though I don't know whether they were at the talk or not. Correlation != causation so I'm hesitant to definitively call shenanigans on this. But it does make me believe ProtonMail's story a little more.
- corobo 10y ago
  Do you have proof or even just evidence of this? You could just be someone that wants to get the jab in at Google.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    How could you prove how a black box algo ranks you?
    - corobo 10y ago
      You can't prove that. The parent can however make the decision to not hide behind a throwaway account, give their company name, suggest how they found out Google employees were in the audience, document the dates they were ranked highly vs low, tell us what area Google is comically bad in, detail what if any SEO practises they were using at the time. Link the site if nothing else so we can all have a look into back links dodgy practises, archive.org copies. You can't prove how a black box algo ranks you, but you can do a damn sight more than a throwaway comment accusing Google of cooking their algorithm out of spite.
      - QuercusMax 10y ago
totalZero 10y ago
Does Google make money from its relationship with government agencies that perform surveillance?
- throw2016 10y ago
  Cultivating government agencies comes in handy especially for global business ops and legal snafus. And I think Google's general 'stalkiness' and getting people used to being stalked ties right in with surveillance culture.
shocks 10y ago
Runbox user here. Can anyone comment on how these two compare? Is it worth switching?
- tinodotim 10y ago
  Runbox is more like a "normal, ordinary" e-mail service with high security & privacy precautions, but for example no integrated end-to-end, zero-knowledge encryption (option) for mails. You can of course use pgp/gpg like with any other service. So in Protonmail, for mails inside the service, from protonmail user to protonmail user, they afaik use a pgp implementation and handle the key exchange. To send secure messages from protonmail to another service, you can encrypt the message / conversation with a password and the recipient gets an email with an url, where he can, given he has the password, decrypt the message and reply securely.
  - shocks 10y ago
    Thanks! I guess I'll stick with Runbox.
imjustsaying 10y ago
Does this have anything to do with what was, retrospectively, a disproportionately pro-Hillary, anti-Trump bias demonstrated in Google News results over the final arc of the election, and the resulting 'out of the blue shock' feeling experienced by so many in America after Trump's election? Or was that simply the result of an effective backlink brigade?
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Can you square this view with Clinton winning the popular vote? You are looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps inaccurate polling (is polling actually helpful anyway?) and reforming a slightly troubled electoral system are the actual problems.
quickConclusion 10y ago
This is why we need good whistle blower protections. If Google does that intentionally, there must be quite a few people in the know at Google. Even without, it just takes to open a throw away account here, and say something.
Steeeve 10y ago
I wouldn't consider ProtonMail a competitor of Google. I would assume they got penalized in search rankings like everyone else. The fact that they went through Matt Cutts to get this resolved is telling - since he's the public face of Google for anti-web-spam/anti-blackhat-seo. > @mattcutts We know Google is intentionally hiding ProtonMail from search results. Interested in talking before our data goes public? Apparently threats help get you attention.
- tinodotim 10y ago
  Matt Cutts isn't the public face for the webspam team anymore, for months if not years now. I think since 2014. He even left google and works for the US Digital Service since this summer. And on the topic: Nope, no penalty. At least no ordinary / known version of typical penalization.
  - paganel 10y ago
    Just found out right now that the "famous" Googleguy user that was posting stuff on Websmasterworld around 2002-2004 has been confirmed as having been Matt Cutts (the article is a little older, from 2011, https://www.seroundtable.com/cutts-googleguy-intheplex-13291.html https://www.seroundtable.com/cutts-googleguy-intheplex-13291...). Those were interesting times, when Google was still playing the "good guy" card trying to get most of the websites' data. I'm pretty sure nothing of that facade has remained in place now.
    - Steeeve 10y ago
      I'm old...
- tyingq 10y ago
  They have been caught tweaking the algorithm to their advantage in the past: "One example from the FTC report shows how hazy the line can be. When testing changes to its ranking algorithm, Google has “raters” manually assess different sets of search results for the same query and rate which one is better. In one such experiment, Google tried demoting “comparison shopping websites” like NexTag to see if its raters liked the results better. When they didn’t, Google tweaked the demotion algorithm until they did."[1] [1]http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/03/google_ftc_report_here_s_why_the_government_and_the_company_agreed_to_a.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/03/...
glaberficken 10y ago
Not condoning any shoddy move by google, but have you noticed how the ProtonMail UI is a shameless ripoff of gmail? See these screenshots from ProtonMail: https://protonmail.com/images/slider/compose.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/compose.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/inbox.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/inbox.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/column-labels.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/column-labels.jpg
- kuschku 10y ago
  First, there’s no copyright on a general style, or theme. Nor can it be patented or trademarked. So, legally, this is already nothing. Second, this is not something Google invented – Google started with webmail, but many other companies had designed stuff like the in-frame editor, or other concepts before Google. So, even if ProtonMail outright copied Google, Google, because they copied together many other people’s ideas, wouldn’t have reached the Threshold of Originality.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    They're called Design Patents. They exist. Apple vs Samsung was quite a famous case over them with hundreds of millions in damages on the line. I have no idea if Google is using Design Patents on their products but can if they choose. https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/03/swipe-to-patent-design-patents-in-the-age-of-user-interfaces/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/03/swipe-to-patent-design-pat...
    - kuschku 10y ago
      ProtonMail is in Switzerland. Neither in Switzerland nor in the EU, Design Patents exist.
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        Your first sentence was broader than that. Far as EU, they're called registered designs. I don't know much about them past that they exist. They're also in Hague Agreement of WIPO which Switzerland is a party to. Apple's attack on Samsung in Germany was about them copying the interface and style. Situation isn't as clear cut to me given the above. Even if nothing applied in Switzerland, the countries supporting such things might block their local presence there under grounds of violations. This risk actually is why some companies, esp Chinese, won't do business in the U.S.. If this played out, they'd be blocked from serving customers in U.S. or any nation that upholded the claim against them.
benkarst 10y ago
Over the past year or two, I'm becoming convinced Google's "Don't be evil" days are over. Does anybody have any recommendations for alternatives to Google Drive?
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I use Sandstorm.io, which you can either self-host or use as a managed service.
ephimetheus 10y ago
Got suspicious about the name Proton, started reading the website, saw that it's based in Switzerland.. and yup, they're Ex-CERNies. :)
hedora 10y ago
The Swiss recently passed this pro-surveillance referendum: https://protonmail.com/blog/swiss-surveillance-law-referendum/ https://protonmail.com/blog/swiss-surveillance-law-referendu... In the blog post, proton says they aren't impacted by the new law. Do any third party analyses agree?
hackuser 10y ago
Perhaps part of the way to address Google's enormous market power is that they should provide remediation when it causes a problem, including transparency when Google's search results place a site significantly lower than it does in competitors' results.
nullnilvoid 10y ago
Don't be evil, Google. This one has clear evidence. I doubt that it is a bug. It only affects Protonmail not others.
tobltobs 10y ago
The domain move which protonmail did looks quite risky: Country TLD to generic domain, new domain parked at Godaddy before and the first owner of this domain run an email server which maybe did unexpectedly closed shop. The domain move happened at the same time when protonmail vanished from the search results. Instead of publicly looking for a scapegoat for their mistake they should tell readers of their blog the one lesson to be learned from this story: Never use a country TLD for something targeting more then this country!
walshemj 10y ago
Doesn't seem (from the tone of that post) that they had anyone on staff to handle the SEO Inbound marketing - where is the summary of what investigation they did. There are ways to reach out to google and get an answer
mikebay 10y ago
Google censoring search results and acting more and more like microsoft in 90's.. time to skip google search engine and support another corporations..
jstrieb 10y ago
On one hand I'm a major advocate of trustbusting and encouraging government regulation of large, potentially competition-squandering companies. But I'm also an advocate of a free and open Internet, entirely unregulated. To me, this case walks the line between the two and I don't think any more can be done with regards to making the "right" judgement without additional, definitive information.
appletv2 10y ago
https://voat.co/v/falconsvseagles/1409278 https://voat.co/v/falconsvseagles/1409278

345 points by based2 10y ago

Direct link to Protonmail's blog post: https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/ https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/

dandare 10y ago

Could you in theory sue Google for (intentionally or not) discriminating against you in the search results? Just in theory.

Kimm0n0 10y ago
Leave that to the EU Commission. They have been look for å case like this for years.
- Steve_Moneytis 10y ago
  btw "EU commission" might soon not appear in Google search results anymore...
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Google search results might not appear in the EU anymore, if Google keeps responding the way they have been.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Indeed. Or Google might be broken up – there’s also antitrust cases against them in the US. With more than half of the population using them, and them holding > 90% in multiple such markets, they fall into the category of monopoly that automatically becomes a public utility – they’re supposed to be just a dumb pipe.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
I'm sure Google would be happy with that because as in all such cases where some blog claims that Google dropped them down the memory hole for absolutely no reason whatsoever, we don't ever hear Google's side of the story. Google has nothing to gain from commenting. But in court they would have a reason to respond, and then we'd find out exactly what kind of malware these guys were hosting, or whatever.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  "Google has nothing to gain from commenting." Defusing a court case would seem helpful. Explaining to those worried by this might be good. Acknowledging you screwed up, fixing it and publicly stating you will do better (then doing better) can actually boost the way a company is seen.
jlgaddis 10y ago
In theory, one can sue Google (or any other party) for any reason whatsoever -- no matter how absurd or "out there". IANAL but I doubt they'd get very far. What would their actual argument even be? Google isn't obligated to include every web site in existence in their index.
- awqrre 10y ago
  Seeing how Google have a near monopoly on Search, perhaps they should be required to... or at least be required not to remove search results of already-indexed legitimate websites.
  - kyrra 10y ago
    How does one create such a list? How do you distinguish domains that have gone rogue (either ones that were legit then went bad. Or if the domain expired or was sold to a nefarious person)? I believe in this case protonmail was hit by an algorithm based derank (not a manual action). What causes it is anyone's guess. But something series of events hurt their ranking. Its also important to note that PM was NOT delisted. They still were getting traffic from Google, they were just deranked.
- morganvachon 10y ago
  > Google isn't obligated to include every web site in existence in their index. No, but to have a competing product appear highly ranked at first, then drop off their search engine entirely and not return until there is a public outcry, screams of anti-competitive action on Google's part[1]. That said, I don't think a lawsuit would get very far either. I'm just saying the whole affair is fishy. [1] Or, if you want to go tin-foil-hat with it, perhaps a certain government told Google it didn't want people to know about a secure email startup that resides in a country that is known for upholding privacy rights. I don't buy that one myself but I've seen it bandied about in the past in similar cases.

simosx 10y ago

The article does not provide an answer and simply poses the question. The fact that Google does not disclose any useful information makes it difficult to figure out what really happened.

tptacek 10y ago

Google has plausible webmail competitors. "ProtonMail" is not one of them. Can someone provide an explanation of why they think Google would elevate this particular random email provider in the media by penalizing their search results?

quickben 10y ago
Wouldn't it be simpler explanation that they just rank down everything with mail in the name?
- tptacek 10y ago
  Is that happening to FastMail?
  - brongondwana 10y ago
    Nah, we come up number 2 for a search for "reliable email" when I'm logged in and number 5 when I'm logged out - which sounds bad, but the stuff about it is all questions about how reliable email delivery is. Fair enough. We don't even rate a mention for "professional email" because it's all about how to not come across like a n00b when writing emails. (interestingly, bing search for professional email has an ad for Google's email above the search results)
    - tptacek 10y ago
      FastMail, unlike ProtonMail, actually has traction. Why is Google supposedly penalizing ProtonMail, but not FastMail?
      - quickben 10y ago
        Eh, we are entering an area of speculation. The right answer is 'only google knows', but since you are asking twice this question, let me try to take a wild guess: - Google, an advertising company, benefits from having access to the plaintext of people's messages. They can advertise this as 'secure' but only for the comm channel. - Proton mail, advertises itself as: "ProtonMail is the world's largest secure email service, developed by CERN and MIT scientists. We are open source and protected by Swiss privacy law.", featuring end to end encryption, anonymous email, mobile clients etc. - Fastmail: "Secure, reliable email hosting for businesses, families and professionals. Premium email with no ads, excellent spam protection and rapid personal support." If I'm a product manager of GMail, I'd be more scared from Proton mail than FastMail. In fact, anything featuring end-to-end encryption will be approached with negativity, because then GMail can't target ads, which are the main cash cow for google.

discordianfish 10y ago

I can't imaging they would do that intentionally and on their own will. It's too obvious and just provides more arguments for the anti-trust complaint.

quickben 10y ago
What, like this one? http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/19/google-could-face-3-separate-antitrust-cases-eu-competition-chief.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/19/google-could-face-3-separate-...
ubernostrum 10y ago
Google has already been getting away with giving unfair priority and treatment to their own properties for years. Why not take the next step and just start outright hiding competitors?
- frogpelt 10y ago
  Google is not required to provide you search results. And they should be expected to market their own products. To expect otherwise is foolish.
  - cooper12 10y ago
    It's a different story when they're the most popular search engine. They have the power to control what others see and unfairly prioritizing their services disadvantages competitors, a big no-no for such a big company like Google. Also, to many people, Google is the internet. Everyone I know just types stuff into the search bar to get where they want to go, not foo.com. If you don't show up in the first page of the Google search results, you don't exist.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > Google is not required to provide you search results. Yes, they are, if they want to access the market at all, they have to provide results to everyone, and can’t discriminate. > And they should be expected to market their own products. No. They have > 90% of the market, which is used by > 50% of the population, meaning they’re automatically a public utility, and can not provide any positive or negative discrimination to their own or other services. Any treatment has to be completely fair and equal, and if their own services can get integration, so any competitors have to be able to do. (For a fair price, of course).

mooman219 10y ago

Let's not forget protonmail.com was previously protonmail.ch. Moving domains can make a tremendously negative impact on search engine rankings. The "fixed" comment could have been properly assigning protonmail.com with the ranking data for protonmail.ch. This detail was in the previous HN post, but looks to be left out of this one for some reason... Disclaimer: This is speculation. Take both this article and my post with a grain of salt.

joelrunyon 10y ago
> Moving domains can make a tremendously negative impact on search engine rankings. Only if you do it wrong. If you do it write, there should be negligible impact.
- mooman219 10y ago
  We don't actually know what happened which is the hard part. They could have done it wrong, or they could have done it right but a bug caused it to be filtered in google search. Maybe some automated process deemed the new side as fraudulent. Last thing anyone wants is a new site with a similar domain stealing SEO. Moving domains always comes with its risks.
  - kleigenfreude 10y ago
    I think that Google removed it from their results intentionally. Google has the ability to restrict results, and for it to be weighted so highly after they "fixed" it, and because they gave no indication of what was wrong, I think the "fix" was to remove it from the blacklist. However, it doesn't change that I use Gmail and will continue to use it. It's still the better product for the money (free).
    - stephengillie 10y ago
      The removal and fix need not have been so blatant - a breaking change for some sites might have been prioritized, and the fix to that break may have had other work pushed ahead of it. There doesn't need to be an explicit blocklist or clearlist in play to make some customers more important.

jklinger410 10y ago

Google often-times makes severe algorithm changes. There is an SEO company called MOZ that keeps track of these. If you see right around the same time that ProtonMail suffered a disruption of rankings they were in the middle of a huge update (https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change). This was May 10th of this year. I am referencing the official ProtonMail blog post (https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/ https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/) linked by another commenter in this thread. I also want to say I'm not a Google employee and have no vested interest in the authenticity in their algorithm. It is very fishy that according to PM they contacted a Google rep via twitter and got a "we fixed something" response from them. As an SEO person, my opinion is this: As an encrypted email service ProtonMail probably gets a lot of foreign and otherwise "undesirable" (or deplorable ;) ) links in the eyes of Google. Google lately has been doing a lot of algorithmic changes to actively sift these types of links out of consideration when ranking sites or dampening them severely. My guess is that Google was basically penalizing PM for the links they were getting without notifying them via Webmaster Tools. Whether or not there was a manual penalty involved that they weren't notified about also adds a little bit of shadiness. Maybe Google thought PM was trying to game the algorithm or at the very least many of the links they were getting were of a spammy nature and they ran a penalty on them. The redirect from them changing a domain in the past can also compound issues with Google. Sometimes they consider redirects spammy depending on what kind of redirect is in place. Without more info it does seem weird that they would "fix" something not only without warning them in the first place but not explaining it afterwards? Most web admins have to use what's called a "disavow" list to remove the penalized links but apparently their rep seemed to do this for them. Probably due to the anti-trusty viral nature of the complaint? I don't know what SERP tracker PM is using for these stats. Barring there were no errors in that system, they can trace the lack of rankings to a lack of organic traffic, and they were given no reasoning to the penalty or what was going on... They may want to hire a lawyer and start an anti-trust suit on Google. This is very fishy without any official information from Google.

walshemj 10y ago
Thats interesting it would be interesting to look at there link profile - getting out of a link penalty is hard it took me over a year to get on client out of one.

joering2 10y ago

What a coincident; I was just wondering when will Proton popup on HN to share my experience. I must say I don't think they even have customer support. I emailed them and opened tickets multitude times with serious questions (looking into moving entire enterprise with 100+ email addresses) but I guess I was neither their type of client nor they simply don't have customer support at all! This issue turned me off and against them entirely; sorry.

blunte 10y ago
I have had good support from them. Maybe it's because I'm a paying customer? What they are doing, both from the backend side and the multiple clients side, is a lot. Chances are they are just really busy with the number of employees they have.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

londons_explore 10y ago

If this post weren't full of vague legal risks for Google, you would likley get a (private) explanation of the cause. As it is now, no employee would risk such communication for fear of it being used against them in an anti trust case, even if it were well meaning. Anti trust cases are worth billions, and a single email saying "we messed up because your URL contained an apostrophe and that caused a bug in our crawler" might well tip the case against Google to a non technical judge or jury.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kuschku 10y ago
If they say nothing, it’s even more likely to be used against them. And I personally think that’s actually good. Open all the antitrust cases against Google at once, so it can be broken up.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Google has had many chances to privately communicate with ProtonMail before they wrote this blog.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

A little suspicious, but lacking hard evidence of trying to hurt competition, I choose to give Google the benefit of the doubt here. I have had a ProtonMail account for a few years and the system keeps getting better. The one feature lacking, and keeping me from using it as a primary email service, is not being able to backup my emails locally. I think that is on their TODO list.

fgpwd 10y ago
They also don't have 2-factor authentication yet.
- vabmit 10y ago
  2fa is being tested on the internal development site, now.
deleted 10y ago
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vabmit 10y ago
Code allowing external access (IMAP etc) to mailboxes that would allow you to download all your mail is in development now. Some IMAP clients (cough Microsoft cough) have "interesting" ways of interpreting/implementing the RFCs. So, it is taking somewhat longer than expected.

n1000 10y ago

> ProtonMail tracked this situation through Spring 2016, trying to get in touch with Google to query why it had vanished from search results — and initially having no luck getting a response. It only eventually got an acknowledgment of the complaint in August after it had tweeted at Google staff. Why is it that large companies like Apple and Google are so hard to reach? Remember the story of the Dash iOS app developer that got kicked out of the store. He also practically was unable to reach anyone.

lucaspiller 10y ago
To be fair what that guy originally said and what happened were two different things. Apple contacted him before they shut down his account. At least that's what Apple said... http://www.loopinsight.com/2016/10/10/apple-responds-to-dash-controversy-with-proof/ http://www.loopinsight.com/2016/10/10/apple-responds-to-dash...
- pedro2 10y ago
  The author says that's not true. He has phone call recording proving he is right: https://blog.kapeli.com/dash-and-apple-my-side-of-the-story https://blog.kapeli.com/dash-and-apple-my-side-of-the-story
  - matt4077 10y ago
    He has a phone recording of how he screws himself, by recording a phone call and trying to escalate a situation that Apple was trying to fix. He's not in the App Store today, because just posting that call without consent shows he can't be trusted. They may have tried to contact him at the address of the second account, which was spamming the store and may or may not have been him.
    - wishinghand 10y ago
      Is the developer from Dash based in the USA? Does two party consent cross international lines? He may not have the concept of not posting a phone conversation because it's a legally allowed thing and he didn't think to check what was the legal norm in Palo Alto.

ComodoHacker 10y ago

In case anyone interested, here are my field test results for "encrypted email", obtained today: Google DuckDuckGo Yahoo Proton Mail 1 16 - Tutanota 7 20 - Gmail - 10 1 (G Suite) "-" means no appearance up to and including second page. Ranking excludes sponsored links.

vladimir-y 10y ago

Has ProtonMail become a really secure? Since when I last time checked web client I noticed that PGP keys are being passed over the internet when you do login (private key), which doesn't look like a true end-to-end encryption since private key should be kept locally and never be passed over the internet. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm note very well versed in the encryption matters.

tinodotim 10y ago
The private key is encrypted using your mailbox password (a 2nd password, not the login password) and that is not stored on their servers. So they only store and pass the private key encrypted. So it should be secure enough but for sure, the implementation is still not perfect at all, especially if you want to communicate with non-protonmail users.
- vladimir-y 10y ago
  > So they only store and pass the private key encrypted. I remember I was able to get key passed through the network in the not encrypted form, I was looking into the network tab of the browser's dev console. When you do login look at the response of the https://mail.protonmail.com/api/auth https://mail.protonmail.com/api/auth POST query.

SagelyGuru 10y ago

I have every sympathy with ProtonMail. Google's behaviour in this certainly looks highly suspect. However, in general, I am not a fan of regulation. I wonder if this problem could not be better fixed by an open source search engine "assistant" that simply polls several existing (competing) search engines? Perhaps implemented as a browser plugin? I base this suggestion on the assumption that not all the usual search engine providers will have the same conflicts of interest. More specifically, in this case, they are not all email providers themselves. For the same reason I trust more the search engine providers who have not added to it all kinds of other business interests. Any thoughts on that? Has anyone tried it?

gnud 10y ago
What search engines are not email providers?
- SagelyGuru 10y ago
  DuckDuckGo?
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    DDG mostly relies on the APIs of other search vendors, who do have email services.
- rvern 10y ago
  Qwant does its own crawling and does not provide email.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant
wiml 10y ago
There were a good many of those in the early '00s before Google rose to dominance. Either integrated into the browser or "meta-search engines" which simply merged the results from a number of other search engines.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

babuskov 10y ago

It looks like a net win for PM. If you look at the graph, before disappearing they had struggled for position and after the fix they are #1. Plus they get publicity like this TC article.

throwawaydev7 10y ago

Anecdata: At a conference a couple of years ago I was talking on-stage about my product. It's a direct competitor to Google in an area that they don't do very well (quite often, comically badly), and my customers are people who care about getting really good results in this area. I made a couple of joking quips about the poor quality of the Google product during this presentation and moved on. Two days later my product completely vanished from the Google rankings. No cause that I could think of; I wasn't doing any questionable SEO or other manipulation at the time. I later found out there were Google people at the conference, though I don't know whether they were at the talk or not. Correlation != causation so I'm hesitant to definitively call shenanigans on this. But it does make me believe ProtonMail's story a little more.

corobo 10y ago
Do you have proof or even just evidence of this? You could just be someone that wants to get the jab in at Google.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  How could you prove how a black box algo ranks you?
  - corobo 10y ago
    You can't prove that. The parent can however make the decision to not hide behind a throwaway account, give their company name, suggest how they found out Google employees were in the audience, document the dates they were ranked highly vs low, tell us what area Google is comically bad in, detail what if any SEO practises they were using at the time. Link the site if nothing else so we can all have a look into back links dodgy practises, archive.org copies. You can't prove how a black box algo ranks you, but you can do a damn sight more than a throwaway comment accusing Google of cooking their algorithm out of spite.
    - QuercusMax 10y ago

totalZero 10y ago

Does Google make money from its relationship with government agencies that perform surveillance?

throw2016 10y ago
Cultivating government agencies comes in handy especially for global business ops and legal snafus. And I think Google's general 'stalkiness' and getting people used to being stalked ties right in with surveillance culture.

shocks 10y ago

Runbox user here. Can anyone comment on how these two compare? Is it worth switching?

tinodotim 10y ago
Runbox is more like a "normal, ordinary" e-mail service with high security & privacy precautions, but for example no integrated end-to-end, zero-knowledge encryption (option) for mails. You can of course use pgp/gpg like with any other service. So in Protonmail, for mails inside the service, from protonmail user to protonmail user, they afaik use a pgp implementation and handle the key exchange. To send secure messages from protonmail to another service, you can encrypt the message / conversation with a password and the recipient gets an email with an url, where he can, given he has the password, decrypt the message and reply securely.
- shocks 10y ago
  Thanks! I guess I'll stick with Runbox.

imjustsaying 10y ago

Does this have anything to do with what was, retrospectively, a disproportionately pro-Hillary, anti-Trump bias demonstrated in Google News results over the final arc of the election, and the resulting 'out of the blue shock' feeling experienced by so many in America after Trump's election? Or was that simply the result of an effective backlink brigade?

lostlogin 10y ago
Can you square this view with Clinton winning the popular vote? You are looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps inaccurate polling (is polling actually helpful anyway?) and reforming a slightly troubled electoral system are the actual problems.

quickConclusion 10y ago

This is why we need good whistle blower protections. If Google does that intentionally, there must be quite a few people in the know at Google. Even without, it just takes to open a throw away account here, and say something.

Steeeve 10y ago

I wouldn't consider ProtonMail a competitor of Google. I would assume they got penalized in search rankings like everyone else. The fact that they went through Matt Cutts to get this resolved is telling - since he's the public face of Google for anti-web-spam/anti-blackhat-seo. > @mattcutts We know Google is intentionally hiding ProtonMail from search results. Interested in talking before our data goes public? Apparently threats help get you attention.

tinodotim 10y ago
Matt Cutts isn't the public face for the webspam team anymore, for months if not years now. I think since 2014. He even left google and works for the US Digital Service since this summer. And on the topic: Nope, no penalty. At least no ordinary / known version of typical penalization.
- paganel 10y ago
  Just found out right now that the "famous" Googleguy user that was posting stuff on Websmasterworld around 2002-2004 has been confirmed as having been Matt Cutts (the article is a little older, from 2011, https://www.seroundtable.com/cutts-googleguy-intheplex-13291.html https://www.seroundtable.com/cutts-googleguy-intheplex-13291...). Those were interesting times, when Google was still playing the "good guy" card trying to get most of the websites' data. I'm pretty sure nothing of that facade has remained in place now.
  - Steeeve 10y ago
    I'm old...
tyingq 10y ago
They have been caught tweaking the algorithm to their advantage in the past: "One example from the FTC report shows how hazy the line can be. When testing changes to its ranking algorithm, Google has “raters” manually assess different sets of search results for the same query and rate which one is better. In one such experiment, Google tried demoting “comparison shopping websites” like NexTag to see if its raters liked the results better. When they didn’t, Google tweaked the demotion algorithm until they did."[1] [1]http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/03/google_ftc_report_here_s_why_the_government_and_the_company_agreed_to_a.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/03/...

glaberficken 10y ago

Not condoning any shoddy move by google, but have you noticed how the ProtonMail UI is a shameless ripoff of gmail? See these screenshots from ProtonMail: https://protonmail.com/images/slider/compose.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/compose.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/inbox.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/inbox.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/column-labels.jpg https://protonmail.com/images/slider/column-labels.jpg

kuschku 10y ago
First, there’s no copyright on a general style, or theme. Nor can it be patented or trademarked. So, legally, this is already nothing. Second, this is not something Google invented – Google started with webmail, but many other companies had designed stuff like the in-frame editor, or other concepts before Google. So, even if ProtonMail outright copied Google, Google, because they copied together many other people’s ideas, wouldn’t have reached the Threshold of Originality.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  They're called Design Patents. They exist. Apple vs Samsung was quite a famous case over them with hundreds of millions in damages on the line. I have no idea if Google is using Design Patents on their products but can if they choose. https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/03/swipe-to-patent-design-patents-in-the-age-of-user-interfaces/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/03/swipe-to-patent-design-pat...
  - kuschku 10y ago
    ProtonMail is in Switzerland. Neither in Switzerland nor in the EU, Design Patents exist.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Your first sentence was broader than that. Far as EU, they're called registered designs. I don't know much about them past that they exist. They're also in Hague Agreement of WIPO which Switzerland is a party to. Apple's attack on Samsung in Germany was about them copying the interface and style. Situation isn't as clear cut to me given the above. Even if nothing applied in Switzerland, the countries supporting such things might block their local presence there under grounds of violations. This risk actually is why some companies, esp Chinese, won't do business in the U.S.. If this played out, they'd be blocked from serving customers in U.S. or any nation that upholded the claim against them.

benkarst 10y ago

Over the past year or two, I'm becoming convinced Google's "Don't be evil" days are over. Does anybody have any recommendations for alternatives to Google Drive?

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
I use Sandstorm.io, which you can either self-host or use as a managed service.

ephimetheus 10y ago

Got suspicious about the name Proton, started reading the website, saw that it's based in Switzerland.. and yup, they're Ex-CERNies. :)

hedora 10y ago

The Swiss recently passed this pro-surveillance referendum: https://protonmail.com/blog/swiss-surveillance-law-referendum/ https://protonmail.com/blog/swiss-surveillance-law-referendu... In the blog post, proton says they aren't impacted by the new law. Do any third party analyses agree?

hackuser 10y ago

Perhaps part of the way to address Google's enormous market power is that they should provide remediation when it causes a problem, including transparency when Google's search results place a site significantly lower than it does in competitors' results.

nullnilvoid 10y ago

Don't be evil, Google. This one has clear evidence. I doubt that it is a bug. It only affects Protonmail not others.

tobltobs 10y ago

The domain move which protonmail did looks quite risky: Country TLD to generic domain, new domain parked at Godaddy before and the first owner of this domain run an email server which maybe did unexpectedly closed shop. The domain move happened at the same time when protonmail vanished from the search results. Instead of publicly looking for a scapegoat for their mistake they should tell readers of their blog the one lesson to be learned from this story: Never use a country TLD for something targeting more then this country!

walshemj 10y ago

Doesn't seem (from the tone of that post) that they had anyone on staff to handle the SEO Inbound marketing - where is the summary of what investigation they did. There are ways to reach out to google and get an answer

mikebay 10y ago

Google censoring search results and acting more and more like microsoft in 90's.. time to skip google search engine and support another corporations..

jstrieb 10y ago

On one hand I'm a major advocate of trustbusting and encouraging government regulation of large, potentially competition-squandering companies. But I'm also an advocate of a free and open Internet, entirely unregulated. To me, this case walks the line between the two and I don't think any more can be done with regards to making the "right" judgement without additional, definitive information.

appletv2 10y ago

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