There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis • Hacker News Board

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#121

Post by opello » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

remedan wrote: post #16

I enjoy the this extension that redirects search results from Fandom and other such terrible hosts to their higher quality indie alternatives. https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy

That's interesting. Some of the fandom wikis are really high quality (memory-alpha, starwars) and were my introduction to the service. I suppose I appreciate that someone paying for the hosting and running the wiki has to be paid for somehow. And this kind of consolidation makes it worse if the underlying provider fails, but ideally avoids that so individually hosted instances don't more silently disappear. It makes me wonder about the most reasonable balance.

I also enjoyed browsing the list of mappings:

https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy/blob/main...

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#122

Post by thataccount » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

I stopped worrying about getting indexed by Google around 2008ish when it became apparent they were trying to impose their own rules on the internet and how things were found. Nowadays, I'm content to not have google index anything at all.

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#123

Post by qlm » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #100

When I still payed Dota, there was a wiki hosted on fandom. The experience was terrible. It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch, and on mobile there were so many ads rendering the whole thing unreadable. The catch is that there was a better wiki, called Liquipedia. But Google never showed it first and I kept getting tricked to click that shitty fandom site. (It was years ago. But I just tested it a bit…

I think the fandom wiki for Dota is effectively dead, with everything being migrated to Liquipedia. Doesn't stop the fandom one from ranking highly though.

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#124

Post by ethagnawl » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

It'd be interesting to learn whether or not Gemini ignores them, too. I would guess not, as these sorts of sites tend to be founts of expert knowledge and insight.

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#125

Post by wand3r » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

ethagnawl wrote: post #124

It'd be interesting to learn whether or not Gemini ignores them, too. I would guess not, as these sorts of sites tend to be founts of expert knowledge and insight.

Yeah same. I assume this is in response to LLM mass slop SEO hijacking or attempts to do LLM poisoning. It is a hard problem. New domains can launch every second with millions of words and pages. Unless you just moved an already existing wiki with thousands of pages and comments, it would definitely be "irregular" to have a millions of pages and content on a 1 month old site.

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#126

Post by no_wizard » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

jmuguy wrote: post #116

raincole wrote: post #100

When I still payed Dota, there was a wiki hosted on fandom. The experience was terrible. It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch, and on mobile there were so many ads rendering the whole thing unreadable. The catch is that there was a better wiki, called Liquipedia. But Google never showed it first and I kept getting tricked to click that shitty fandom site. (It was years ago. But I just tested it a bit…

Yeah fandom has done this to several games. its taken a huge effort on the part of the Satisfactory community to make sure people know the official wiki is https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/ and not the garbage on fandom. Using an extension to block fandom.com results is helpful because for other games I'm not really thinking about it when searching for something and find myself on that tumor of a website.

Shoutout to Kagi search for having a deny list feature. It’s really nice for this sort of thing.

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#127

Post by wizzwizz4 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

As a workaround, the browser extension Indie Wiki Buddy (https://getindie.wiki) will identify links to a relevant wiki in search results, and rewrite them to the wiki preferred by the community. It's quite useful.

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#128

Post by numpad0 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

Sounds like the same behavior as Twitter "shadowbans" in which you get severe visibility penalty after a jackpot. What would be the metric tied to this behavior?

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#129

Post by no_wizard » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

Ygg2 wrote: post #65

unglaublich wrote: post #47

> Subdomains of existing domains are totally fine Damn, another push to centralizing and walling off user content in 'fandoms', 'reddits' and other closed communities? Have the internet cards been handed out now, and are we in the end-game? Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?

That or Google is getting so unusable even Discord is a better search engine.

I realize that this is a tangent but one of the more sad developments of recent developments as an advocate for open knowledge is how much of it is trapped on servers like discord that will never be indexed by any search engine.

There isn’t even an ability to turn on a feature to have discord chats indexed or anything. I realize it’s not only discord but it’s illustrative of what I perceive as an issue

Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis

#130

Post by swiftcoder » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #110

KingMob wrote: post #5

This is a shame because Fandom is frequently terrible, but also consumes all the oxygen.

Fun fact: Fandom was co-founded by Jimmy Wales "On February 4, 2026, Jay Sullivan was named the new CEO. In a public statement following the arrival of Fandom's new CEO, the company's president, Jimmy Wales, mentioned that they intend to incorporate additional AI tools into Fandom Wikis to adapt to internet searches" . No comment.

It was certainly an interesting way to squander much of the good will generated by being a wikipedia founder. On the other hand, fandom made him rich, so it's all swings and roundabouts