
Has Hacker News fallen down the Google listings for everyone? - whiskers
I visit Hacker News everyday by searching the name in Google and clicking the first result.<p>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.<p>What's going on?
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jpadvo
For reference, there is another discussion about this here:

<http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3277661>

A few people from Google, including Matt Cutts, are taking part in that
discussion.

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benologist
Google 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.

~~~
dextorious
Actually: "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
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.

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
"""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
Sigh... 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
I 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"".

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user24
This 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>

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.

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tokenadult
Usually 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.)

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gwright
I 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.

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pace
Yep the same here. Somehow HN lost its first place. PG needs to get advice at
Blackhatworld ;)

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gaoprea
Search 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> .

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paulofisch
I used to do the same thing until I memorised the URL and it was always the #1
result.

Now it's 7th.

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brador
Given 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.

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ggordan
Slightly related, and I might be a bit late to this party, but is Google
defaulting to https for anyone else?

~~~
polyfractal
Yep. Google is defaulting to https for everyone who is logged into various
Google services:

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-
se...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html)

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sktrdie
Weird, mine appears on the second page.

~~~
VMG
you're probably not searching US google - try google.com/ncr

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pilooch
use 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> or seeks.fr.

~~~
dextorious
Yes, let's give my search history to even more people...

~~~
pilooch
why 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
"""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
You'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.

~~~
dextorious
"""You'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."""

If only.

"""Use Tor and you'll be a new man."""

Yeah, like those Anonymous guys where, when the police came busting their
doors down.

Tor is not a guarantee for anonymity, except if you are extremely careful
about your movements. Lot's of stuff can be correlated back to you.

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destraynor
Agree - just experienced the exact same thing. It was my #1 forever, and now
isn't in top 5. Weird.

Bad Google, bad.

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n9com
Just bookmark it :)

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cletus
FWIW I've raised this issue. Not sure what happens to those but something
should come of it.

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gadders
Yes, has for me. Always used to be top entry for "hacker news". Fules.

