Live data from Hacker News

Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

journal.james-zhan.com

71–80 of 199 posts

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#71
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know exactly how they work, but they have a single entry point, as a customer you don't really care that the system is global, and they also have a single control plane, etc. Decisions are efficient if they need to be taken only once. The underlying architecture is irrelevant for the end user. Why do you think they're a monopoly in the first place? Obviously because they were more efficient than the competition and…

> Decisions are efficient if they need to be taken only once. In other words, open source decentralized systems are the most efficient because you don't have to reduplicate a competitor's effort when you can just use the same code. > Obviously because they were more efficient than the competition and network effects took care of the rest. In most cases it's just the network effect, and whether it was a proprietary or…

> just use the same code

This is the great lie. Approximately zero end consumers care about code, the product they consume is the service, and if the marginal cost of switching the service provider is zero, it's enough to be 1% better to take 99% of the market.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#72
post #60

The author doesn't know the cause but states "The whole affair is Google’s fault"?

There are three possibilities:

Author's fault, Google's fault, someone else's fault.

From the post, while it is hard to completely rule out the possibility that author did something wrong, they likely did everything they could to remove the suspicion. I assume they consulted all documentation or other resources.

Someone else's fault? It is unlikely, since there isn't (obviously) another party involved here.

Which leaves us to Google's fault.

Also, I mean, if a user can't figure out what's wrong, the blame should just go to the vendor by default for poor user experience and documentation.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#73

Google search results have gone shit. I am facing some deindexing issues where Google is citing a content duplicate and picking a canonical URL itself, despite no similar content. Just the open is similar, but the intent is totally different, and so is the focus keyword. Not facing this issue in Bing and other search engines.

Yeah, Google search results are almost useless. How could they have neglected their core competence so badly?

B.c they shifted their internal KPI in 2018 roughly, to keeping users on Google and not tuning towards users finding what they are looking for ie. Clicking off google.

This is what has caused the degradation of search quality since then.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also noticed Google having indexing issues over the past ~year: Some popular models on Hugging Face never appear in the results, but the sub-pages (discussion, files, quants, etc.) do. Some Reddit pages show up only in their auto-translated form, and in a language Google has no reason to think I speak. (Maybe there's some deduplication to keep machine translations out of the results, but it's misfiring and disca…

The issues with auto-translated Reddit pages unfortunately also happens with Kagi. I am not sure if this is just because Kagi uses Google's search index or if Reddit publishes the translated title as metadata. I think at least for Google there are some browser extensions that can remove these results.

The Reddit issue is also something that really annoys me and i wish kagi would find some way to counter it. Whenever I search for administrational things I do so in one of three languages, German, French or English depending on which context this issue arises in. And I would really prefer to only get answers that are relevant to that country. It's simply not useful for me to find answers about social security issues in the US when I'm searching for them in French.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#77
post #51

Without going into details. The company I work for has potentially millions of pages indexed. Despite new content being published everyday, since around the same October dates we are seeing a decrease in the number of indexed pages. We have a consultant for the topic but I am not sure how much of that conversation I could share publicly so I will refrain myself of doing so. But I think I can say that it is not only a…

What "changes in methodology applied by Google in September" are you referring to? There surely is a public announcement that can be shared? Most curious to hear as a shop I built is experiencing massive issues since august / september 2025

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#78
post #27

Breaking News: Google de-indexes random sites all of the time and there is often no obvious reason why. They also penalize sites in a way where pages are indexed but so deep-down that no one will ever find them. Again, there is often no obvious reason.

Do you have any resources here? The /r/seo subreddit seems vers superficial coming from an web agency background so its hard to find legit cases versus obvious oversights. Often people make a post describing a legit sounding issue on there just to let it shine through that they are essentially doing seo spam.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but how did 2 work before you fixed it? You saved the queries people did and displayed them?

So the spammer would link to my search page with their query param: example.com/search?q=text+scam.com+text On my website, I'll display "text scam.com text - search result" now google will see that link in my h1 tag and page title and say i am probably promoting scams. Also, the reason this appeared suddenly is because I added support for unicode in search. Before that, the page would fail if you added unicode. So th…

What does Unicode have to do with links?

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#80
post #65
post #58

When I reload the page " https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-b... ", I get Request URL: https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-b... Request Method: GET Status Code: 304 Not Modified So maybe it's the status code? Shouldn't that page return a 200 ok? When I go to blog.james..., I first get a 301 moved permanently, and then journal.james... loads, but it returns a 304 not modi…

You get a 304 because your browser tells the server what it has cached, and the server says "nothing changed, use that". In browsers you can bypass the cache by using Ctrl-F5, or in the developer tools you can usually disable caching while they're open. Doing so shows that the server is doing the right thing. Your LLM prompt and response are worthless.

When Chrome serves a cached page, like when you click a on this page and then navitate back or hit F5, it shows it like this:

Request URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196076

Request Method: GET

Status Code: 200 OK (from disk cache)

I just thought that it would be worthwhile investigating in that direction.

Post reply on HN