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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'

#181

Post by snprbob86 »

bascule wrote: post #179
divtxt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is common violation that everyone accepts. It's definitely done by 'bad' clients - not sure how often servers send bare LF. (I used to telnet to port 80 for testing, and type GET / HTTP/1.0 , and that should be LF on Linux & Mac)

You don't have a problem with one of the most trafficked sites for programming/web startup-related news implementing HTTP incorrectly? Do you ignore whether your HTML is valid just because the browser rendered it correctly?

Yup.

I've got real work to do. Making a validator happy is fake work.

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

#182

Post by resnamen »

mmaunder wrote: post #162

PG: welcome to the woes of being an alexa top 1000 site with over 1 million pages of dynamic content. HN has roughly 1.3 million pages indexed by google. 1.3M pages at 43k per page is 53 gigs to cache static versions of all pages on the site. Quadruple that for a worst case scenario and it'll still easily fit on a single drive. When your site gets this popular you tend to have to re-architect your application to solv…

I'd like him to fix the experience for non-bot users first, namely the "Unknown or expired link" issue.

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

#183

Post by billpatrianakos »

moses1400 wrote: post #124
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'…

Completely agree with you Hahla - amazing to see the Googlers jump in including Matt Cutts so quickly to support PG and HN and YC yet 99.99999999% would never ever see support like this.

Let's be real here. Do 99.9999...% of users need or deserve this kind of support? It's easy to have sour grapes and say "oh the big shots get attention but I don't! Not fair!". But then you have to remember that people like PG worked their ass off to get a site like this to become so valuable and popular. We're not talking about some guy's blog about his cat that no one cares about, we're talking about HN here. Is it equal treatment? Of course not but is it fair? I say it is fair.

If fairness is treating people based on merit then it's totally fine. Matt isn't in here saying he's going to manually manipulate the result or change anything on Google's end (save for maybe correcting a flaw that would benefit everyone who's in a similar situation as HN). All he's doing is suggesting possible causes, trying to make a diagnosis, and just troubleshooting.

Most people who want this attention don't deserve it. They're the type of people who won't use the resources available like the google help documents or even learning how to administrate a site for best results in search engines. Plus, most people's website just aren't worthy of this attention.

I could go on but lets look at the reality here. We're all knowledgeable of how the web works here so let's just admit that HN is a damn popular site and it definitely seems like a fluke to have it rank as it was when this was submitted.

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

#184

Post by billpatrianakos »

18pfsmt wrote: post #146
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 ?

To be fair, I've seen Cutts jump in on "no-name" threads where there is an issue with Googlebot or some search-related thing. It does not appear to be favoritism, beyond choice of forums in which to participate.

Fairness is what it's all about. I like yiur choice of wording. A lot of people have a problem with Matt Cutts jumping in because they feel it's not fair. They're mistaking equality for fairness. This is perfectly fair but not equal. Equality sucks. Fairness is better. Fairness is treatment based on merit and equality is just equal treatment no matter what the situation. Equality can really screw you if you're on the wrong side of it.

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

#185

Post by bascule »

snprbob86 wrote: post #181
bascule wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have a problem with one of the most trafficked sites for programming/web startup-related news implementing HTTP incorrectly? Do you ignore whether your HTML is valid just because the browser rendered it correctly?

Yup. I've got real work to do. Making a validator happy is fake work.

Some of us actually care about interoperability, maintainability and writing good code in general as opposed to just cowboying stuff together as quickly as possible

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

#186

Post by Animus7 »

bascule wrote: post #185
snprbob86 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I've got real work to do. Making a validator happy is fake work.

Some of us actually care about interoperability, maintainability and writing good code in general as opposed to just cowboying stuff together as quickly as possible

I used to preach the same thing.

Then, working at a startup taught me that it's not black and white. Several quotes come to mind, but Voltaire's is my favorite:

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #171
benatkin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought that Google Search would be so laughable.

Excellent contribution... Ugh, this is why I don't mind if HN is listed on Google or not. So which part is laughable? The part where they're able to crawl the vast expanses of the web and return relevant results for the majority of their users? Or is it the part where they came out of nowhere to dominate search because they did it better than the rest? Come on now, you can't be all things to all people. Google is far…

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by pilif »

snprbob86 wrote: post #181
bascule wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have a problem with one of the most trafficked sites for programming/web startup-related news implementing HTTP incorrectly? Do you ignore whether your HTML is valid just because the browser rendered it correctly?

Yup. I've got real work to do. Making a validator happy is fake work.

By ensuring that your pages are valid, you make it ever so much more likely that you will not have to scramble around wasting time at a most inopportune time when the new version of a browser comes out which handles your non-standards compliant tag soup differently than the current version of the browser.

So, do you want to pay the price upfront when you can plan for it or afterwards when the fix must be done immediately because customers are complaining?

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

#189

Post by AgentConundrum »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #131
AznHisoka wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's not a super hero.. and no he doesn't help everyone that asks for it. I've brought up many issues over the years to him via Twitter, blog comments, emails, etc, and none of them.. count them.. ZERO have been addressed by him. He just gives preferential treatment to those sites that make a lot of noise, and might give Google or Google's quality team a lot of negative press. That's all he does. I've even brough…

Hi AznHisoka. A lot of people send me spam reports, and I'm happy to pass them on. But normally we investigate the spam reports without sending back specific feedback of what action we took in response. P.S. Just curious--is this the same AznHisoka from BlackHat World, the "Blackhat SEO forum"? http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/137345-azn...

> normally we investigate the spam reports without sending back specific feedback of what action we took in response

I understand why you have to do this, but I wish there was at least some transparency regarding confirmation that an issue has at least been looked at, as opposed to just filed as a spam report.

I've only reported one issue to Google before, and the site in question, though incredibly obviously bad, is still the top link on the SERP for the business.

Specifically, there's a pizza place here in Halifax, NS that looks like it didn't renew it's domain in time, and some people are squatting it with an old copy of the site plus their own spammy links. The site[1] displays a copy of the site from 2008 or so, with a banner on the top which reads:

> To previous domain owner: We bought this domain after expiration so it's not our fault that you lost it. We put old content for this domain only to avoid losing good quality of it from SEO point of view. If it's a problem for you contact us ASAP!

I reported it to Google months ago and never heard a word about it, but today when I search for the business name - which I'd imagine a lot of people do when looking for menus, phone numbers, etc. - the "compromised" site still ranks first on the SERP[2]. I wonder how many people even notice the banner telling customers that this is not the page you're looking for.

[1] http://jessys.ca

[2] https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=jessys%20piz...

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

#190

Post by ticks »

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…

The preferential treatment is kind of annoying TBH. I've seen sites disappear from Google's listing for months as a result of simple issues such as a change of domain name (with all the required redirects in place).

Yet here, a website owner is purposely blocking the crawler and they jump with solutions to try to fix the problem. Sigh.

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