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Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)
- tpolzer 9y agoHas to be a transient problem, I get ProtonMail as first unpaid search result for both queries they mention.
- dvt 9y agoDid you not read the article? It was eventually "fixed." > 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.
- Joe-Z 9y agoPlease don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. HN-Guidelines tell us to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It wouldn't take anything away from your response just leaving that question out. BTT: Why is this even an article on here anyway when the situation has been dealt with one year ago? The title should already mention that it's from 2016.
- evolighting 9y agoThat why google is there. If it is facebook, things would be different
- yesenadam 9y agoI get what you say about not insinuating, though I feel the two people who asked so far weren't so much insinuating as actually puzzled, as it genuinely seemed the parent couldn't have read the article and still thought it was an ongoing issue.
- woof 9y agoThe missing guidelines: * Please read submissions before commenting on them
- Joe-Z 9y agoThe question "Did you even read the article?" adds nothing of value, if not downright hostility. When someone asks a question/writes an uninformed response and one wants to respond to it, fine. But don't complain that someone made you respond to it.
- tomtomistaken 9y agoThere was a "fix" in August after a public intervention from protonmail. Did you read the article?
- mcny 9y agoThe submission is flawed. There is no [2016] in the title. I wish I could downvote submissions because I would give this post -2.
- n1000 9y agoThis article is from 2016. Maybe this should be mentioned in the headline.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- f_allwein 9y ago[2016]. Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en Of course, there can be other issues preventing a site from showing up in the search results (e.g. site migration issues, accidentally locking out Googlebot in robots.txt, ...). In such cases, the best way to raise the issue would be to report it on the webmaster forum, which is frequented both by smart and helpful users and by Googlers working on search quality: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters
- joosters 9y agoSo Google's recommended way of reporting a problem is to post on a forum that Google themselves don't officially read (or promise any kind of response)? Do you understand why some people might not think that's a satisfactory solution?
- mquander 9y agoOne might think that how satisfactory it is depends on how well it works. The parent is asserting it works pretty well.
- fastball 9y agoIt's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results... I'll rag on Google's poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it's warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted / what-have-you is not Google's client and shouldn't expect first-class support for things like this.
- awestroke 9y agoAnyone know a good alternative to ProtonMail with no ties to the Israeli Military? Preferably European.
- mitchellberry 9y agoMailfence. I'd be very interested to hear the problems with protonmail, considering all they claim to see is email metadata. Edit: ok some quick googling says its related to ddos protection, which is still in effect currently, the malicious intent here seems overstated. The official statement - https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/protonmail-israel-radware/ https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/protonmail-isr...
- dvdkhlng 9y ago* https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en * https://mailbox.org https://mailbox.org posteo implements multiple encryption schemes: encrypt incoming mails with GPG (making them inaccessible by any end device not having the corresponding secret key). Or encrypt via the login passphrase with transparent decryption on authorized access.
- openplatypus 9y agoSo does Mailbox.org but unlike posteo Mailbox allows using own domain. The only issue is "German" quality customer support. So be patient and expect to receive terse "no." ;)
- ionised 9y agoAnother vote for Posteo.
- rocqua 9y agoIt is great data hygiene to use encryption at rest. However, it gives no security guarantees. You still need to trust posteo. If posteo wants, they can read all incoming email. Their security scheme depends solely on their good intentions. Still great that their data at rest is encrypted in a way even they cannot read. The scheme does defend against third parties outside of posteo being able to access data, or coerce posteo to decrypt data. Posteo could probably still be coerced to push out a fraudulent client update that still breaks their encrpytion, but that is a very hard problem to deal with.
- durfdurf 9y agowas there a reason given as to why the company was dropped from search results?
- z3t4 9y agoDon't depend on search for people to find your product. Just like you do not include vesting when comparing salaries between startups.
- zbentley 9y agoYou're not wrong, but this would require a radical re-architecting of huge swaths of how marketing and entrepreneurship currently works in most of the world.
- renaudg 9y agoThis is a bit naive in a world where the address and search bars in browsers have merged, and many physical adverts don't even feature a website address any more, just search keywords.
- z3t4 9y agoIt's branding. You advertise for a trademark that you have control over. If the users are using Android or Chrome they'll see some ads on their way to your website, but they will eventually get there, but that's ok I guess. What I mean is you should not depend on, for the life of your business, that a keyword like "secure email" will send traffic to your website, unless that is your trademark or brand name, and in that case you better own secureemail.com Back in 2006 or so when the address field became a search bar in most major browsers, I started to get a lot of traffic from Google, but 99% was searching for mydomain.com, I'm not talking about that kind of traffic, I'm talking about SEO keywords that will kill your business over night when (not if) Google change their formula or some algorithm removes your site from the search result. It's a bit upsetting that web browsers have monetized the address bar, but that's another, yet important discussion.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoSo I do what? Printout flyers with a link to my unmonetized blog and put them on subway stations? Talk about completely impractical advice.
- 9y ago
- alexasmyths 9y agoThis needs a full anti-trust investigation. If it's true that this has happened, then they need to have a regulatory oversight body right up in their operations. The power of search engine is immense - they could change stock market outcomes, election outcomes, entire economies.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tobltobs 9y agoWasn't this at the same time when ProtonMail migrated their site from a .ch to a .com? I would be thankful if I would be able to get such a special treatment from Google for a borked migration. For most of us it is a death sentence when we bork a migration, protonmail gets help and then they whine about it.
- spuz 9y agoWhat do you mean by borked migration? What could Proton mail have done better?
- GregMartinez 9y agoWithout knowing their migration strategy it is hard to say. A few things I notice that get borked often with migrations are not handling redirects & internal links properly, not updating sitemaps & canonical tags, and not checking Google Search Console & robots.txt
- spuz 9y agoMy question was more specifically about ProtonMail's domain migration which the commenter I was replying to implied to have specific knowledge of.
- mjw1007 9y agoThat doesn't really fit the way web-crawler-based search engines work. If the search engine is working properly then if the new site looks the same to users it ought to look the same to the search engine. If Google's crawler didn't find the new site at all then they need a better crawler. Maybe this was incompetence rather than malice on Google's part, but it was one of the two. (An exception would be if you migrate a site and mess up your robots.txt or similar to forbid the search engine doing its job. But evidently that didn't happen here because the fix was at Google's end.)
- Jerry2 9y agoProtonMail is not safe. To delete someone's ProtonMail account, just print their email onto some posters, put it up in some public place, take a picture of it and tweet it to ProtonMail. And just like that, the email of your target will be probably deleted. https://i.imgur.com/d9K9Wdm.png https://i.imgur.com/d9K9Wdm.png This is not a service you want to use for anything important. If you have some enemies, they can use this method to ban you.
- DanBC 9y agodishonest summaries don't help your point.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Cenk 9y agoThis is hyperbolic and dishonest at best. Please leave your memes on reddit.
- Quarrelsome 9y agoAre we complaining that you can't put up a poster explicitly designed to incite violence against anti-fascists with a ProtonMail email address? I'd imagine they might also disable your account if you use swastikas as your logo, is that "awful censorship"? If you wanna do that sort of stuff then roll your own ffs. Consider that they might have some form of legal liability.
- mindondrugs 9y agoExactly this, complaining that a site banned you for breaking ToS is kinda stupid.
- flipp3r 9y agoWhat the parent post was saying is that anyone can print out a piece of paper with your mail address on it, complain on twitter, and ProtonMail's feeling-based policy will have you banned.
- dmitriid 9y agoA friend of mine tweeted a couple of days ago: On the one hand, net neutrality is truly a problem: evil ISPs decide for you what you will and will not see. On the other hand, google, youtube, facebook, twitter and others already decide this for you. But you don't even know that they don't show things to you. (sorry for poor translation from Russian)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mark_l_watson 9y agoThere are many major actors, both corporate and governmental, that don’t like privacy enhancing services like ProtonMail. No conspiracy theory, just large actors acting ruthlessly in their own self interest. This year old article is a bit bogus though. As other pointed out, the hit on SEO came from changing from .ch to .com ProtonMail, and other similar services, deserve to be supported in my opinion. I have recommended ProtonMail to friends and family. I use them out of personal choice, and I also rely on Fastmail.
- WalterGR 9y agoThis year old article is a bit bogus though. As other pointed out, the hit on SEO came from changing from .ch to .com Could you point to a source for this? I'm curious, because the article says: "After that public exchange, ProtonMail was apparently informed within a few days that Google had 'fixed something' — and after that it was able to see immediately positive results" Switching to a different domain shouldn't _delist_ a site from Google's SERPs as long as the switch is done properly...
- kllrnohj 9y ago> Switching to a different domain shouldn't _delist_ a site from Google's SERPs as long as the switch is done properly... Is there any reason to believe ProtonMail did the switch properly? Maybe Google's fix was just to manually correct for ProtonMail botching the switch?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cpr 9y agoI think you could spell it out more clearly that the various three-letter agencies in the USA are quite interested in suppressing information about getting-popular systems that thwart their snooping.
- notheguyouthink 9y agoIs ProtonMail still free? If so, I dislike that greatly. I switched to FastMail a while back and while reviewing options, I wanted to use ProtonMail.. but a free option seems far too unreliable for something as important as email. I need to know how they're paying the bills, basically. I prefer their incentives to be perfectly inline with mine, because I am paying their bills for my portion of usage.
- bogomipz 9y ago>"“[E]ven though Google is an American company, it controls over 90% of European search traffic. In this case, Google directly caused ProtonMail’s growth rate worldwide to be reduced by over 25% for over 10 months,” he adds." If a substantial part of your funnel is attached to another company's whims then maybe it was past time to think about your strategy for building product and brand awareness. >"“The only reason we survived to tell this story is because the majority of ProtonMail’s growth comes from word of mouth, and our community is too loud to be ignored." Again it was up to you to diversify what sounds like an over reliance on Google for 25% of your growth. Portraying that as into "victim survivor" story is a bit dramatic. This sounds like a yarn they are spinning for potential investors. And not a very good one.
- eqmvii 9y agoI mean, if that one company is Google and the reason is search, you don’t have many options. This specific case is much harder to avoid than the general one of over reliance on one entity.
- bogomipz 9y ago>"I mean, if that one company is Google and the reason is search, you don’t have many options." The point is you shouldn't rely on the vagaries of a third party for your business growth period. More especially a third party you don't appear to have any relationship with. They even admit in the blog post that the majority of their growth comes form "word of mouth." Word of mouth and "hoping for the bes"t with Google searches is not really a solid marketing plan.
- DavideNL 9y agoI wonder if this will backfire somehow. Google (privacy nightmare) removing ProtonMail from its search results will only attract more privacy conscious people...?
- 0xADADA 9y agoShouldn't we all be using DuckDuckGo anyways?
- saalweachter 9y ago"Google's search results should contain exactly what I personally think they should in every case," said the HN commentator. "But they mustn't be personalized," said his boon companion. "Oh no, personalization is Evil." They nodded in agreement and upvoted each other's comments.
- rusk 9y agoGoogle's PR monkeys hard at work I see! I find it very, very hard to believe that HN readers would vote such a comment to the top.
- rscnt 9y ago^ Is that reply a sign, that HN is slowly transforming itself to some sort of 4chan board?
- noretire 9y agoIt would certainly be better than the current Randian cryptobullshit circle jerk it is right now...
- dang 9y agoWe needn't invoke foreign entities to explain why HN voters would upvote it. Smug comments routinely get upvoted. The fault is with us, not shadowy outsiders. Apropos of which, it's in the site guidelines not to bring in insinuations of astroturfing unless there's actual evidence, so could you please not do that on HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rusk 9y agoApologies all.
- nickspag 9y agoI think we all see what you're saying- but a competitor... completely disappearing from everyone's "personal" searches? That's slightly different, no?
- dreamcompiler 9y agoSearch is now as vital to the Internet as DNS. As such, having it be run by an unregulated, for-profit monopoly is looking less and less acceptable. As a minimum remedy, Google should probably establish a defined email address or web site where complaints like this are answered within 24 hours by a human. It's not like they can't afford it, and it might hold off full-on regulation of their activities a while longer.
- zbentley 9y agoSuch a help line, if actually known to regularly be helpful changing the ranking position of websites in search results, would be constantly spammed by "SEO Experts" looking to get result-bumps for their sites. This has three possible outcomes, none of them good: - The spam-support-call volume is too high and the hotline becomes so clogged that users with legitimate complaints don't even bother. As in, a ratio of 1000 SEO assholes to 1 user, 10 hour hold times, etc. - The hotline is so thoroughly staffed that this becomes the "new SEO" technique (think: robocalls to improve rankings, or contracting firms of humans in $cheap_location to make calls on the SEO person's behalf). Even if legitimate complaints are addressed in the process, the rest of the search results become even more spammy. - The hotline operators develop an intensely high suspicion threshold for any requests to change a site's appearance in rankings. It becomes known by users with legitimate complaints as a near-impossible uphill battle to get their position back, and is not used by many.
- drdaeman 9y agoBy saying "full-on regulation of their activities" do you suggest that it's some (which exactly?) government or committee is who would decide on search ranking algorithms and what shows up in the results and what doesn't? Or is it something else?
- dreamcompiler 9y agoI'm suggesting that, in an effort to ensure fairness of opportunity and no anticompetitive practices are taking place, governments might begin to see Google as the public utility monopoly that it has de facto become, and start treating it like one. Google might want to get out in front of this by being a bit more transparent and responsive to its users.
- mintplant 9y agoRelatedly, Google refuses to list my personal site (spinda.net) for reasons I can't discern. It only shows up if one searches for the exact domain itself, and even then as a bare entry with no description. I've tried submitting the URL through every avenue Google offers for recrawling—no dice.
- kyrra 9y agoI'm assuming you set up your site in webmaster tools[0]? If there is a problem, it should report it to you. Besides that, there is not much on your site that is of value as to why Google would link to it. It just links to your other projects other sites that you are on. If I do a google search for your name + "spinda", your Github, Twitter, and Keybase entries come up. Then search result #12 or so is your website. I'd say Google is actually doing this right, as it's giving users a direct link to the sites of "value", while your meta-link site may not be as much value to people. Google would rather have people get directly to useful, than having to click through to other sites first. Now, if you had something on your site that was changing (a blog or something), it may be ranked higher. But as of now, I don't see why Google would put it high up in the rankings. [0] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
- mintplant 9y ago> Then search result #12 or so is your website. Oh, that's new. Previously it didn't appear at all in the results, even for specific, targeted queries matching the site content. And I see it's now showing a title and cache link (but no blurb), whereas before it appeared as: spinda.net https://spinda.net and only for the query "spinda.net", in a special position up at the top.
- Too 9y agoWhat one could do to prove this type of abuse would be to do a daily search for terms you think should match your site and record how high in the results it appears, and do it for various search engines. If you plot this over time and see a sudden drop you know Google has identified you as a threat.
- LeeHwang 9y agoGoogle needs to be investigated and broken up. Its beyond time for an investigation and regulation of Google from the united states government. Other countries are already starting work against Google. The power Google wields over the general public warrants severe investigation at even the hint of abuse of power.
- bootlooped 9y agoIf that were true, then it would definitely also be true for Facebook as well.
- beaconfield 9y agoThis is extremely disturbing. I'm a recent convert to ProtonMail and I am not going back to the free, ad-based email world. Google and Facebook are not companies I trust any longer. DuckDuckGo, ProtonMail, Signal are.
- brudgers 9y agoTo me, this is why the arguments over Net Neutrality are really an argument over which corporations are favored by existing regulations. Google isn't neutral and it is integral to the way people use the net.
- franz899 9y agoSharing an article from an amp page when talking about Google manipulating search results is quite the touch.
- arcaster 9y agoMust've been after it's feature on last night's episode of Mr. Robot....
- ucaetano 9y agoProtonMail is the first result when I search for "secure email", even when not signed in.
- Xorlev 9y ago[2016]
- godshatter 9y agoSame here, even when using duckduckgo and !g.
- misterhtmlcss 9y agoI just use duckduckgo. I've tried it for years and it just wasn't good enough and then about a month ago I got fed up with Google's data mining again and tried it for like the 5th trial period and I haven't switched back. If you haven't tried duckduckgo for over a year then I suggest you give it a trial again. I'm running a custom theme to remove the Google search bar from my Android phone, installed Firefox Quantum and set up a Mozilla account, so now everything is gone from Google except my Gmail and that will happen next along with Dropbox too. If you want Google to be a better organization then you have to vote with your feet. Do that and your voice will eventually mean something, but until then Google won't listen.