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>The WSWS has been blacklisted in searches dealing with history, and in particular historical topics related to the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century.

>The WSWS has been blacklisted in searches dealing with history, and in particular historical topics related to the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century. These include the terms “Russian revolution,” “Bolshevik revolution” and “October revolution,” all of which returned results in the top 50 in April That's probably ... correct.

tanilama 9y ago
Blaming their own SEO failure to censorship. Sounds pretty left to me.
- virgil_disgr4ce 9y ago
  Why?
  - tanilama 9y ago
    Inflating self-inflicted problem makes it look like serious institutional flaws then take chance to act like victims, without sufficient evidence to back one's own claim.
- dang 9y ago
  Ideological flamebait is against the HN guidelines, so would you please not post it here? If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
virgil_disgr4ce 9y ago
What do you mean?
- macspoofing 9y ago
  Because they are an ideological advocacy group so they have a revisionist perspective on certain parts of history. What it means is that they don't speak objectively on those periods - so they shouldn't be returned as a search result if neutral terms are used.
ReadEvalPost 9y ago
Why is that correct? Looking at their website they're currently running a lecture series/look back at the Russian revolution: http://www.wsws.org/en/special/1917/chronology.html http://www.wsws.org/en/special/1917/chronology.html None of it seems to be conspiracy theory or low-quality material.
- markbnj 9y ago
  It may not be but if Google's goal is to promote authoritative sources there's no reason to consider WSWS to be authoritative for those search terms, imo. I'm not saying I agree with their goal, just that this seems consistent with it, and I imagine that's what the reply was getting at.
  - thesmallestcat 9y ago
    What does "authoritative" mean anyway? I don't want my search results to be authoritative, I want them to be relevant, varied, and interesting. Google is not an encyclopedia. Google fails recently at providing varied results, on any topic you get a Wikipedia article, a load of the same blogspam from sites like Guardian, Atlantic, or Daily Mail, and then the same 1-2 paragraph article repeated 15 times on content farm websites. It used to be a lot easier to find weird corners of the web.
    - adventured 9y ago
      > Google is not an encyclopedia. Google fails recently at providing varied results, on any topic you get a Wikipedia article That's not recent. Google has been returning Wikipedia as a near universal top result for a decade. Regarding content farms, they overwhelmingly smashed the content farms with their panda & penguin updates years ago and have refined the destruction of content farms since then. Very few remain, much less sustain, outside of temporary niche corners.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 9y ago

tanilama 9y ago

Blaming their own SEO failure to censorship. Sounds pretty left to me.

virgil_disgr4ce 9y ago
Why?
- tanilama 9y ago
  Inflating self-inflicted problem makes it look like serious institutional flaws then take chance to act like victims, without sufficient evidence to back one's own claim.
dang 9y ago
Ideological flamebait is against the HN guidelines, so would you please not post it here? If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.

virgil_disgr4ce 9y ago

What do you mean?

macspoofing 9y ago
Because they are an ideological advocacy group so they have a revisionist perspective on certain parts of history. What it means is that they don't speak objectively on those periods - so they shouldn't be returned as a search result if neutral terms are used.

ReadEvalPost 9y ago

Why is that correct? Looking at their website they're currently running a lecture series/look back at the Russian revolution: http://www.wsws.org/en/special/1917/chronology.html http://www.wsws.org/en/special/1917/chronology.html None of it seems to be conspiracy theory or low-quality material.

markbnj 9y ago
It may not be but if Google's goal is to promote authoritative sources there's no reason to consider WSWS to be authoritative for those search terms, imo. I'm not saying I agree with their goal, just that this seems consistent with it, and I imagine that's what the reply was getting at.
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  What does "authoritative" mean anyway? I don't want my search results to be authoritative, I want them to be relevant, varied, and interesting. Google is not an encyclopedia. Google fails recently at providing varied results, on any topic you get a Wikipedia article, a load of the same blogspam from sites like Guardian, Atlantic, or Daily Mail, and then the same 1-2 paragraph article repeated 15 times on content farm websites. It used to be a lot easier to find weird corners of the web.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > Google is not an encyclopedia. Google fails recently at providing varied results, on any topic you get a Wikipedia article That's not recent. Google has been returning Wikipedia as a near universal top result for a decade. Regarding content farms, they overwhelmingly smashed the content farms with their panda & penguin updates years ago and have refined the destruction of content farms since then. Very few remain, much less sustain, outside of temporary niche corners.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago