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Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

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Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#111

Post by DanBC »

pierrefar wrote: post #83
markerdmann wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's helpful, thanks. I haven't kept a record of those searches (they were mostly programming-related queries), but I'd be happy to submit reports in the future. Is there a URL or email address for this purpose?

At the bottom of every search results page is a link that says something like "give us feedback". That's your first point of call for reporting bad results, spam, etc. If you have a whole bunch queries that are somehow related, like say we do a bad job at Python function names, then you can collect them and post them on our forums in one go. And please give us details as Matt said. In particular, If your refer to a s…

I've given feedback. A few days later the "broken" search was fixed. I have no idea if there's any link between the two, or if it was just a temporary glitch. But thanks for fixing it if it was fixed.

And I'd LOVE to see some of the reports (but I know that'll never happen) because it'd be amazing to see some of the worst reports.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#112

Post by benatkin »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #9

I think I know what the problem is; we're detecting HN as a dead page. It's unclear whether this happened on the HN side or on Google's side, but I'm pinging the right people to ask whether we can get this fixed pretty quickly. Added: Looks like HN has been blocking Googlebot, so our automated systems started to think that HN was dead. I dropped an email to PG to ask what he'd like us to do.

I never thought that Google Search would be so laughable.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#113

Post by wheels »

pg wrote: post #15
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #9

I think I know what the problem is; we're detecting HN as a dead page. It's unclear whether this happened on the HN side or on Google's side, but I'm pinging the right people to ask whether we can get this fixed pretty quickly. Added: Looks like HN has been blocking Googlebot, so our automated systems started to think that HN was dead. I dropped an email to PG to ask what he'd like us to do.

I sent you an email about this. (A couple weeks ago I banned all Google crawler IPs except one. Crawlers are disproportionately bad for HN's performance because HN is optimized to serve recent stuff, which is usually in memory.)

Have you considered putting a caching reverse proxy in front of the arc app to keep the backend from having to render all of the old pages?

It seems like the only dynamic element of old articles is the "$x days ago" bit and that'd be pretty easy to turn into something static by instead just putting in timestamps in the actual HTML and using Javascript to transform them into how many hours / days ago they were. Then the crawlers would just be pulling out cached, pre-rendered HTML.

There's an example of doing such with nginx here:

http://serverfault.com/questions/30705/how-to-set-up-nginx-a...

With that you'd just have to send out the HTTP header from the arc app saying that current articles expire immediately, and old ones don't.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#114

Post by novedieci »

pierrefar wrote: post #43
hahla wrote: post #29

Does anyone else find it disturbing that google employees are bending over for pg/hn? Seriously, if any other webmaster blocked googles bots they wouldn't change their algorithms to accommodate, or see how they could use less of our resources. Its pg's fault not googles, and I dont see why they should care. Maybe from their standpoint it would be more beneficial to google users who are used to typing in 'hacker news'…

From my personal point of view, I help webmasters when I see an issue. It's part of my job and it's something that gets me fired up. I help when I go on our forums, I do that here, and I'm regularly helping webmasters on Google+ (my team does regular webmaster hangouts that anyone can join - see my profile: https://plus.google.com/115984868678744352358 ) and also on Twitter. We can't cover everything, we can't be eve…

Anyone know if this is also a common issue with BingBot? Our site is doing fine in Google at the moment, but was completely deindexed by Bing, and we're totally baffled.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#115

Post by noduerme »

larrys wrote: post #99
blhack wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing threads like this remind me that HN is still a pretty tight-knit community of real people doing real things. It's good to see this stuff sometimes. Thanks, Matt! edit: And then reading some of the other threads on this topic is a bit...something. Guys, can you calm the conspiracy theory nonsense a bit? Please? If you're not on this site very much, you might not realize that Matt pops into almost every thread w…

"This isn't HN getting some sort of preferential treatment, this is just the effect of having a userbase full of hackers" Of course it's preferential treatment. And if you scan the last month or two of Matt's comments they are general in nature and not specific as in: "I think I know what the problem is; we're detecting HN as a dead page. It's unclear whether this happened on the HN side or on Google's side, but I'm…

All these years, you thought you were working with machines, and finally it turns out coding is a "people business". Did they change, or did you? Is quality less important than networking now because social networks make quality the equivalent of good networking? Or because of some corruption in the pure bootstrap capitalism of code=web=money=power? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I am concerned about being told to accept the output of raw logic and algorithms as holy writ, only being told a bit later that everything's negotiable if you have a personal relationship.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#116

Post by product50 »

hahla wrote: post #29

Does anyone else find it disturbing that google employees are bending over for pg/hn? Seriously, if any other webmaster blocked googles bots they wouldn't change their algorithms to accommodate, or see how they could use less of our resources. Its pg's fault not googles, and I dont see why they should care. Maybe from their standpoint it would be more beneficial to google users who are used to typing in 'hacker news'…

Baseless comment. If they don't help, you will say - HN is one of the top sources of tech news in the world and it is surprising no one from Google is responding to such an obvious mistake. If they help, you comment as stated.

Secondly, HN is one of the most popular sources of tech news. By responding to this issue, Google is helping bring out possible solutions to a common problem - that crawlers are too frequent and affect the performance of a site. People like you and me can read the responses and learn what can be done to control this.

Third, popular websites like HN deserve attention like this because of the following they have garnered over the years. If,say "hahla blog" doesn't show as a top result in Google - it will take time for Google to verify whether it should even be shown as a top site. But, if something like HN or Amazon.com doesn't show as top result when users explicitly searches for it - that is a darn good use case for Google to fix the issue. It is an indication of something is definitely wrong somewhere that needs to be fixed.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#118

Post by waitwhat »

test5625 wrote: post #62

Don't link to Google search results! It's personalized - everyone sees different results. Even if you don't have a Google account. For me http://news.ycombinator.com is the top page. But when I use TOR, http://www.hackernews.com and http://thehackernews.com/ are on top. I don't think it's possible to get a real "invariant" result page. It all depends on which computer you use (cookies, language setting, ip address).

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-disable-goog...

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#119

Post by jiggy2011 »

larrys wrote: post #101
blhack wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does anyone else find it disturbing that google employees are bending over for pg/hn? Umm...no. They're not tweaking the algo, they're explaining to PG that he should stop blocking the crawlers, or that he should verify the site in google webmaster tools, then change the crawl rate.

Umm...Yes. Seems like "bending over" to me: "but I'm pinging the right people to ask whether we can get this fixed pretty quickly"

"get this fixed pretty quickly" != "change the search algorithms"

I can usually get the hacker news by just googling for "hn"

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#120

Post by larrys »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #74
felipe wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am glad Google is a company made up of humans and not uncaring robots That's exactly the problem. Google is notorious for providing horrible customer support, so why some people get personalized help, while the rest of us are stuck with the uncaring robots ?

I see your point and maybe my attitude toward it is totally biased or morally/ethically off balance but I think it's just fine. PG knows his shit. He knows how to block crawlers, he knows how get SEO done, he's no dummy. "So what?" you say. Well I work in web development and I meet with people all the time and explain to them how to run a site and get rankings up, etc. I tell them I'll give them the tools, show them…

PG: "A couple weeks ago I banned all Google crawler IPs except one"

With regard to this issue doing the above is not evidence of knowing your shit in the area in question.

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