Live data from Hacker News

Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

reuters.com

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

#11
This is an interesting page:

https://tuta.com/email-comparison

Whereupon we find the following comparisons:

>"Protonmail vs Tuta Mail

Fastmail vs Tuta Mail

Mailbox.org vs Tuta Mail

Posteo vs Tuta Mail

Hushmail vs Tuta Mail

Startmail vs Tuta Mail

Riseup vs Tuta Mail"

...in other words, there's no shortage of email providers...

Re: Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

#13
post #3
post #2

The article says March, which coincidences with this: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-updat... It's possible Tuta caught a stray here because they recently changed their name from Tutanota[0], including the domain name. This update has the SEO world up in arms, in fact - the update is still rolling out, nearly two months after it was announced. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the Google Sea…

https://tuta.com/blog/google-search-problem This article goes into much more detail about the issue.

Not so much detail about the key issue: "We have no idea why Google is no longer showing our website for thousands of keywords that we used to rank for in the past."

Re: Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

#14

It might not just be Google--I tried searching "encrypted email" in DDG and found nothing for pages and pages. Even saw AOL come up before any mention of Tuta. My guess is the name change, combined with prior bad reputation on the tuta.com domain (see http://web.archive.org/web/20190107213809/http://tuta.com/ ), is causing the issue across search engines.

Tuta is ran by absolute morons.

A few years ago, under their other domain, they accused Microsoft of suppressing them in a ranty blog post.

How?

Because their users couldn't sign up for Microsoft accounts using the tutanuta domain.

But why?

It wasn't Microsoft suppressing them. The fucking morons created an azure tenant validated against the domain. The default setting is to then validate all users with said email against the azure tenant. You can always turn it off but ill advised for security purposes.

I even validated that their tenant exists on azure using that domain.

The devil in the details mean the morons were using the same domain used by public users, for internal corporate usage which is absolutely fucking insecure to the moon.

Nobody should trust these wankers whose first response is to "blame big tech company" instead of understanding basic cybersecurity and internet. Who knows how they even store your emails. There are plenty of other services that I'll trust before the one that runs around for attention like a toddler.

Re: Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

#15
post #2

The article says March, which coincidences with this: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-updat... It's possible Tuta caught a stray here because they recently changed their name from Tutanota[0], including the domain name. This update has the SEO world up in arms, in fact - the update is still rolling out, nearly two months after it was announced. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the Google Sea…

> It's possible Tuta caught a stray here because they recently changed their name from Tutanota[0], including the domain name.

I was wondering about the similarity when I saw the headline; I can't imagine why would they do it. Why would they voluntarily destroy their own brand recognition?

> I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the Google Search team's offices to learn just how much machine learning is messing with the ability to properly understand intent -> rank content.

I'm not normally the fan of ML (ab)use, but I think it's unavoidable here: ML worsening result is an unfortunate consequence of them operating in strongly adversarial environment. After all, SEO is just a polite way of calling actively poisoning the search engine rankings.

(Yes, SEO is also making your website legible to crawlers - in the same way advertising is about informing the customers about your offering. That's part of it, but not the part sought by customers of such services, or that makes most money.)

Re: Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

#16
post #13
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://tuta.com/blog/google-search-problem This article goes into much more detail about the issue.

Not so much detail about the key issue: "We have no idea why Google is no longer showing our website for thousands of keywords that we used to rank for in the past."

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co... makes it sound (to my ears)as if they try to distinguish between sites with a single or a few topics and sites that try to match lots of searches.

So... What are the thousands of keywords for which Tuta should rank high?

Re: Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

#17

It might not just be Google--I tried searching "encrypted email" in DDG and found nothing for pages and pages. Even saw AOL come up before any mention of Tuta. My guess is the name change, combined with prior bad reputation on the tuta.com domain (see http://web.archive.org/web/20190107213809/http://tuta.com/ ), is causing the issue across search engines.

Hmm... Interesting. I tested on Kagi and it appeared at No. 13 for me. Not too bad, but compared to proton, it's quite easy for people to ignore.

Re: Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

#18

It might not just be Google--I tried searching "encrypted email" in DDG and found nothing for pages and pages. Even saw AOL come up before any mention of Tuta. My guess is the name change, combined with prior bad reputation on the tuta.com domain (see http://web.archive.org/web/20190107213809/http://tuta.com/ ), is causing the issue across search engines.

Tuta is ran by absolute morons. A few years ago, under their other domain, they accused Microsoft of suppressing them in a ranty blog post. How? Because their users couldn't sign up for Microsoft accounts using the tutanuta domain. But why? It wasn't Microsoft suppressing them. The fucking morons created an azure tenant validated against the domain. The default setting is to then validate all users with said email ag…

> The devil in the details mean the morons were using the same domain used by public users, for internal corporate usage which is absolutely fucking insecure to the moon.

Care to explain why this is so insecure?

Re: Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

#19
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tuta is ran by absolute morons. A few years ago, under their other domain, they accused Microsoft of suppressing them in a ranty blog post. How? Because their users couldn't sign up for Microsoft accounts using the tutanuta domain. But why? It wasn't Microsoft suppressing them. The fucking morons created an azure tenant validated against the domain. The default setting is to then validate all users with said email ag…

> The devil in the details mean the morons were using the same domain used by public users, for internal corporate usage which is absolutely fucking insecure to the moon. Care to explain why this is so insecure?

If I get an email from @tuta.com, how do I know if it’s an official staff account, or a member of the public?

Re: Google rival Tuta complains to EU tech regulators about de-ranking

#20

This is an interesting page: https://tuta.com/email-comparison Whereupon we find the following comparisons: >"Protonmail vs Tuta Mail Fastmail vs Tuta Mail Mailbox.org vs Tuta Mail Posteo vs Tuta Mail Hushmail vs Tuta Mail Startmail vs Tuta Mail Riseup vs Tuta Mail" ...in other words, there's no shortage of email providers...

And no shortage of SEO keywords.
Post reply on HN