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Has Hacker News fallen down the Google listings for everyone?
I visit Hacker News everyday by searching the name in Google and clicking the first result.
This morning the site was at 5th place - and now the first link in is 8th place and a specific submission, not the home page.
What's going on?
- sktrdie 15y agoWeird, mine appears on the second page.
- VMG 15y agoyou're probably not searching US google - try google.com/ncr
- pace 15y agoYep the same here. Somehow HN lost its first place. PG needs to get advice at Blackhatworld ;)
- paulofisch 15y agoI used to do the same thing until I memorised the URL and it was always the #1 result. Now it's 7th.
- benologist 15y agoGoogle is ranking other sites for that phrase, most famously it happened when RRW (or maybe Mashable) became the #1 result for facebook login. You can solve this by typing news.ycombinator.com in the address bar, the phrase 'hacker news' is vague enough that rightly or wrongly YC might not always hold the #1 position.
- whiskers 15y agoI appreciate the concept - I'm just surprised at how dramatically the results have changed (literally) overnight.
- dextorious 15y agoActually: "wrongly". "Hacker News" is not that vague so that this site would fall from number one and some random junk site would rise on #1. What gives?
- adgar 15y agoActually, search is always subjective. If another site which delivers news for hackers - even if they don't call it "hacker news" - rises in quality, popularity, or X other factors, it may be that users want that site over HN when they do that search. I agree that in this case hacker news should be higher and that this is a bug. But just because hacker news is called that doesn't mean that query might feasibly be better served by another site. To assert otherwise is pretty surprising.
- dextorious 15y ago"""Actually, search is always subjective. If another site which delivers news for hackers - even if they don't call it "hacker news" - rises in quality, popularity, or X other factors, it may be that users want that site over HN when they do that search.""" What I'm seeing in the results page are not those kinds of rags to riches stories. Mostly irrelevant obscure junk.
- adgar 15y agoSigh... so you just couldn't bear to read the second half of what I wrote? It wasn't a long post. It really wasn't. > I agree that in this case hacker news should be higher and that this is a bug. But just because hacker news is called that doesn't mean that query might feasibly be better served by another site. To assert otherwise is pretty surprising.
- dextorious 15y agoI read it. I just wanted to get the actual point across. The actual point being not the hypothetical, but this particular case. Also, doesn't your "second half" misses a "not"? Like: """But just because hacker news is called that doesn't mean that query might NOT feasibly be better served by another site. To assert otherwise is pretty surprising"".
- gaoprea 15y agoSearch results may be different depending on what you've been searching recently, it's the personalization of search http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274207 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274207 .
- tokenadult 15y agoUsually if I type "ne" in the URL line on my browsers (any of my browsers that I use regularly), I see the full URL of Hacker News displayed as the URL to go to. It is startling to NOT see the true, orange Hacker News displayed as the top result when I do a Google search on the title of the site. Maybe more of us need to put up more organic links with well chosen link text to this site from sites that are in our control. (Perhaps we should surround that link text with comments about the site guidelines here before doing that, however.)
- gadders 15y agoYes, has for me. Always used to be top entry for "hacker news". Fules.
- gwright 15y agoI wonder if it is a side effect of the recent algorithm change that promotes more 'timely' matches. The fact that 'news' is in the search term list might exacerbate this effect.
- n9com 15y agoJust bookmark it :)
- brador 15y agoGiven the users who visit here, we could prop it up to #1 overnight. Saying that, doesn't HN block search bots from going deep? I remember reading that somewhere.
- ggordan 15y agoSlightly related, and I might be a bit late to this party, but is Google defaulting to https for anyone else?
- polyfractal 15y agoYep. Google is defaulting to https for everyone who is logged into various Google services: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-se...
- destraynor 15y agoAgree - just experienced the exact same thing. It was my #1 forever, and now isn't in top 5. Weird. Bad Google, bad.
- destraynor 15y agoAgree - just experienced the exact same thing. It was my #1 forever, and now isn't in top 5. Weird. Bad Google, bad.
- cletus 15y agoFWIW I've raised this issue. Not sure what happens to those but something should come of it.
- pilooch 15y agouse a seeks proxy, it will personalize results for you and let hacker news float on top after the first click, and according to clicks on other instances through p2p. http://www.seeks-project.info http://www.seeks-project.info or seeks.fr.
- dextorious 15y agoYes, let's give my search history to even more people...
- pilooch 15y agowhy not share your search history ? what is the drama about it exactly ? seriously, since you can remain anonymous easily, I'd be interested in the reasons why you would not want to share queries and clicks.
- dextorious 15y ago"""seriously, since you can remain anonymous easily""" Easily, how? AFAICT, it's anything but easy. """I'd be interested in the reasons why you would not want to share queries and clicks.""" I don't want my preferences for naked hairy gay sailors to be known (oops, too late). I don't like to feed marketers and advertisers with information. I don't believe what I choose to read at home is anyone's business, so why should I treat what I read on the web any differently? It's only a "drama" to be mocked IF you live in your own little world, and no one, bar some advertisers, ever cares about you and your opinions. And you have to be living in the right country, too. Me, I would like to be able to do all below: a) use the interwebs b) be vocal against my government and/or whoever I see fit (in real life) c) not have my interests easily available to anyone
- pilooch 15y agoYou're misinformed. Anomymity is damn easy. Add a single hop to the search engine or any other machine, and you're basically done. Remove some http headers and you're free. Use Tor and you'll be a new man. As for sharing queries and clicks, everything is shared encrypted (hashes). You're sharing hashed file fragments over bittorrent ? Do the same with queries. It's a win / win situation. Your friends and peers get higlighted results and so you do. FYI Google and all broad range search engine do this in the background, on their servers to improve results. They use various machine learning algorithms and adhoc tweaks for this. Sharing queries and building a P2P collaborative filter for search is just a way to expose the mechanics, with broad benefits and flexibility for users, computer scientists and hackers.
- user24 15y agoThis is interesting. From an SEO perspective, the phrase "hacker news" doesn't appear many times on the site itself, but surely a great many incoming links must use that text. at most 228 days ago the title tag changed from "Hacker News | $title" to "$title | Hacker News": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542 But that's quite a long time back so I'd be surprised if that has anything to do with it. I have noticed that Google does put a huge amount of weight on domain name keywords, but thehackernews.com was registered in Oct 2010, so it's not like it's only just appeared. Can't really see any reason for this.
- jpadvo 15y agoFor reference, there is another discussion about this here: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3277661 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3277661 A few people from Google, including Matt Cutts, are taking part in that discussion.
- StatHacking 15y agoThis is an example of why Goog's search algorithms (and others') should be open: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3268371 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3268371 A subtle attack may be by making bots stop indexing it or using SEO practices to lower it enough so it would become unsearchable, and therefore, non-existent. Or just crack into Google...