Apparently Google hates us now • Hacker News Board

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#61

Post by skeptic_ai » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

vrganj wrote: post #8

echelon wrote: post #5

Pokemon Central runs ads (Google AdSense at that!), which is probably how they pay for everything. Google is likely their biggest inbound source of traffic, so they're probably experiencing a marked revenue drop as well. It's unfortunate that so many livelihoods are subject to the capricious whims of a single company. A company that is increasingly seeking to keep users on their engine without sending eyeballs or rev…

Hi EU. How about one of those lovely anti-trust cases?

I really hope eu can extinguish Google before they extinguish all websites. Will be an exponential death of website very soon once they lose traffic.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#62

Post by zeitg3ist » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

sitebolts wrote: post #56

Google's always adjusting its search rankings, but it's rare for a legitimate site to suffer such a sudden massive hit without reason. My first thought would be that they accidentally blocked Google's crawler (maybe through some kind of anti-AI setting?) or that Google believes that the site is serving malware or spam. Either scenario can have that kind of effect. I can see that their forum at least appears to have s…

A blocked Googlebot would’ve caused a report of 403s in the Search Console, which isn’t the case. And the subdomain has worked perfectly fine for the last 15 years.

You may have a point with the Trainer Central rebranding, but please consider this in the context of Italian language results. It’s not about reaching the home of the wiki (which is pretty much the only page that’s still indexed), it’s all the other search queries (Pokémon names, moves, games, etc - without adding “pokemon central” even) that usually returned our wiki’s dedicated page as first result (or top 5 at least) and now those specific pages are not even indexed anymore.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#63

Post by caminanteblanco » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

phyzix5761 wrote: post #42

Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.

I was listening to David Bowie's Suffragette City as I read your comment (Apparently Bowie was a popularizer of 'wham bam, tym' usage)

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#64

Post by elaus » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #37

Can someone start a new Google, please? Just search, nothing more. I'm willing to pay 10 USD a month for that. API access included.

Kagi has been mentioned already, just to provide anecdotal reference: searching for "pokemon wiki" with the country set to Italy shows OP's website as first result.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#65

Post by declan_roberts » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

I suspect this is a cloudflare thing since the other search engines are doing fine. I'd look closer into your cloudflare settings and see what you can relax.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#66

Post by WarmWash » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #39

logicchains wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All large companies are sociopaths, but few tech companies treat their paying customers with the level of contempt that Google does.

I'm not sure most of those calling the shots at Google realizes they even have paying customers other than advertisers. Notably though, website publishers and consumers of their massive products like Search, Gmail, and Android are not really customers.

A bit outside of HN's typical domain, but I wonder the treatment that top ad buyers get from Google.

Like if you are the VP of advertising for Procter & Gamble, and your nephews gmail account gets banned, are these guys treated so specially that they can get a white glove unban just like that? I wouldn't be surprised for Googles golden geese if they can

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#67

Post by fredley » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #23

frouge wrote: post #9

I can even tell you that Google hates us all

Google neither hates nor loves any of us, the only thing it cares about as an institution is cramming as many advertisements in front of as many people as it can get away with to generate increasingly ridiculous piles of money. This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.

Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#68

Post by ZeWaka » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

Interesting. My small game wiki was also affected ~3 weeks ago. It doesn't even show up on Google anymore even if you directly search for the URL.

We don't get any spam since there's no public signups for editing access.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#69

Post by andrepd » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

hungryhobbit wrote: post #18

They're a wiki. Wiki spammers are relentless now. Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as…

Weird Gloop (wiki host, started with runescape but now has dozens) has blogged about this https://weirdgloop.org/blog/clankers

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#70

Post by 0x5FC3 » Wed, May 20, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

sitebolts wrote: post #56

Google's always adjusting its search rankings, but it's rare for a legitimate site to suffer such a sudden massive hit without reason. My first thought would be that they accidentally blocked Google's crawler (maybe through some kind of anti-AI setting?) or that Google believes that the site is serving malware or spam. Either scenario can have that kind of effect. I can see that their forum at least appears to have s…

> They're also using a subdomain for both their wiki and forum, which Google has been observed to punish. They might consider moving each of those to their own separate .com domain.

Any sources for this? AFAIK, Google treats websites on a subdomain as a separate entity.