A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankings

Is it possible that google is now turning to sites that have a strong moderation policy, as a vetting strategy against LLM generated posts? (Maybe November 2022 is turning out to be a new kind of Eternal September for the rest of the Web...)

I started using this website after downloading brave, and I typed &quot;news&quot; into the search bar and it <i>automatically</i> directed me here. I was instantly fascinated by the diversity of articles and high quality discourse, and so I&#x27;ve stayed for way longer than I thought. But, yes, unfortunately, as with Reddit and Xitter, one day HN with suffer the fate of popular social media, probably not too long from now. Social control is the name of the game, and you can&#x27;t win without monopolizing. I only hope Dang can hold down the fort for as long as possible; HN will be the Masada of the internet. (Well, I suppose there is still 4chan, but that&#x27;s not going anywhere. 4chan will probably be around long after the death of every other social media website.)

so the theory is that now there will be a lot of bots taking over HN and posting stuff that they want to rank up, destroying the value of the site? What&#x27;s the defense there?

Not for nothing, but I was able to raise HN in my Kagi search rankings (and demote others) because I wanted to do it, not because a Googler on the Search Team made a slide deck about HN. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.kagi.com&#x2F;kagi&#x2F;features&#x2F;website-info-personalized-results.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.kagi.com&#x2F;kagi&#x2F;features&#x2F;website-info-personalize...</a><p>Best $10 I spend every month.

What&#x27;s worrying here also is Google&#x27;s willingness to use a random comment as the source for its snippets.<p>I understand that the average HN commenter puts more effort into their comments, and their veracity, than the average internet user elsewhere, but still.<p>(For me, the top &quot;result&quot; for <i>Monaco in italian</i> is the Google Translator widget with Collins Dictionary, Wikipedia and Quora the top 3 links. HN is 4 or 5 links below.)<p>Oh, and yes, let&#x27;s hope spammers don&#x27;t overwhelm dang!

I often find myself searching on HN, then Reddit (via google) and then good old sad google, in that order.<p>When Google arrived, it had the solution people were desperately waiting for. It was pretty much <i>everything</i> we wanted. And it even &quot;wasn&#x27;t evil!&quot;<p>Now it feels like people at Google are just making sure they&#x27;ll qualify for their annual bonus with total disregard to what happens to the company.<p>I forecast that in the next 1-3 years, we&#x27;ll see another company steal the search market, just like Google it back in the day. But Google, don&#x27;t worry, they&#x27;ll &quot;just be a search company&quot;.

Dear Google, we were only adding ‘site:reddit.com’ or ‘site:news.ycombinator.com’ to search queries so we could get to opinions that weren’t being manipulated by SEO fiddlers. What’s our alternative now?

@dang I would like to make the argument that the increased attention from Google will exert a downwards pressure in HN quality due to marketers taking advantage of its influence and search ranking to conduct influence operations.<p>Would you be willing to consider the possibility of delisting the site with robots.txt?

I&#x27;ve always thought it was strange that HN never appeared in search results. I mean content here has a very high SNR and seems to me that it checks all of Google&#x27;s SEO boxes. So I always assumed not showing up was intentional, as in dang has been delisting it on purpose and blocking bots. Now that it&#x27;s showing up, I kind of want it to go back the way it was. The only reason I read HN so much is because I have given it a high degree of trust, that even though I don&#x27;t know most commenters, I can easily reason about content, find the sources, discover amazing tools and read from founders directly. I really, really do not want to worry about whether the front page is now ads.

What happens when hn outgrows it&#x27;s current self? Even now, the front page is pretty fast paced. Things get burried pretty quick. Sometimes I see an interesting post and comments and think to my self I want to come back later when I have more time but it&#x27;ll be a few pages off the front by then.

We need more sites like hackernews. X &#x2F;twitter used to be that , but it&#x27;s now overwhelmed with bots and SEO. The more boring you make a site (no colors, no images, no links) the better the defense against spammers.

Note to the author, if reading: the page is marked as German language which makes some browsers prompt to translate from German, despite being in English.

Interesting observation but nothing more than a bit of fearmongering after that. It seems likely that HN content would appear more regularly because it&#x27;s one of few places left on the net that regular fresh discussion on recent topics is occurring with solid moderation.<p>Community is hard. And requires moderation. And it&#x27;s done here with great care. Don&#x27;t worry about the spam, the fight is real but the problem is also very appreciated on the ground here by Dang and mods as you can tell. Keep it up. And meanwhile you can help by submitting quality content from regularly reliable sources, not upvoting dupes, contributing thoughtful discussion and keeping discussion focused&#x2F;organized, as many of you do.

Eternal september more accelerated.

This is karma for us originally starting the fire about typing reddit in our Google searches (I believe it&#x27;s fair to say this was discovered independently by many technically proficient people over the course of the preceding half decade), but we definitely had a hand in publicizing it.<p>I&#x27;m curious what the end result will be but will be disappointed if the quality of HN decreases to be more in line with Reddit et al.<p>What makes HackerNews different from Reddit is that people I actually respect frequent here, real players at the game of life and whatnot (whatever that means), and I can&#x27;t say the same about Reddit. If it gets too popular I can see that being jeopardized.

Maybe it’s because HN is well moderated and open to automated scraping, unlike other systems that are being locked down (reddit, Twitter) so the user generated content is now significantly more valuable to search engines.

Since everyone more or less seems to agree on some shape or form of the &quot;problem&quot;, what about the following solution;<p>Create a devils pact with the elite astroturfing people who no one seems to be bothered by or able to identify. Exchange data, and root out the &quot;problem&quot;.<p>If you can&#x27;t beat them, join them. The lesser evil is still perceived as a better experience after all. Our enemy his enemy is our friend.

I think the only defense for increased spam is accounts will need to be tied to real people through some other identification.<p>Sucks, but is there an alternative?<p>I’m open to the idea of no new accounts if it got bad enough.<p>I recently switched to more actively using my account that has my name as the username, anticipating the growing problem of spam detection, and trying to make it more clear this account is not spam.

Is it not called &quot;Parasite SEO&quot;[1]?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kiwop.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;parasite-seo-what-is-it-and-how-to-do-it#:~:text=Parasite%20SEO%2C%20also%20known%20as%20parasitic%20SEO%2C%20refers%20to%20a,the%20ranking%20of%20another%20site" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kiwop.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;parasite-seo-what-is-it-and-ho...</a>.

Next Google should boost the rankings of forums. And we can all go back to forums. And the internet can be good again.

Ruh roh. Google is finally fixing the search ranking problem, <i>good and hard</i>. Be careful what you wish for.

For years I had no idea of this forum, no Apple technicians I worked with ever mentioned this site. Rixstep.com linked this forum (in 2016) in one of their articles and that&#x27;s how I found it. Definitely felt like being given a gift. HN is&#x2F;was a true hidden gem.

I basically stick &#x27;site:news.ycombinator.com&#x27; to most of my searches these days anyways, to the extent I should look for a plugin to have it permanently added (although mostly via DuckDuckGo or Brave Search).<p>It is a preciously rare gem on today&#x27;s web.

Sadly the broader the topics gets on hacker news the less relevant searching site:news.ycombinator.com becomes. This isn&#x27;t a value judgement on the articles a lot of them are very interesting, but more narrow had some value for finding things.

HN deserves to be at or near the top of search results because the quality of discourse is so high here, and on a very wide range of topics.<p>I have noticed an increase in errors here in the past few months though, I wonder if this is the cause.

I suspect this is because when they rolled out their Perspectives \ Discussions tab, Reddit completely dominated the results. One article I read said they appeared in 97.2% of results.

Google knows your preferences and tailors your search results accordingly. You are The hidden gem. Use anti tracking and privacy tools.

I noticed that Google is ranking Quora very high lately. Which is absurd because the first answer on Quora is usually auto-LLM answered post.<p>I have to actively exclude Quora to get a better answer.<p>The enshittification of the Web has truly begun.

The weird thing is I just saw a few crypto scammers posting on other threads. Sucks to be popular.

It seems with the recent wave of layoffs people now have more free time to be on Hacker News.

&quot;It is also noteworthy what it HN ranking for:<p>A comment is the top result for &quot;where was gta made&quot;.&quot;<p>Not for me. Wikipedia is #1. I retrieved 100 results. None of them were HN comments.<p>&quot;A comment from desdiv is ranking #1 for the question &quot;Monaco in italian&quot;&quot;<p>For me Wikipedia was again #1. HN comment was #2.<p>&quot;Another article that ranks well for several keywords like &quot;ruined my life&quot; is GRAHAM PANTHER&#x27;s article, and HN also ranks well for brand-related KW, such as every question about the cost of youtube tv, where Google favours the post from thunderbong.&quot;<p>For the search &quot;cost of youtube tv&quot;, NerdWallet ranked #1. HN comment was #10.<p>It is baffling to me that people, who certainly know that results for the same query can vary according to a number of factors, e.g., geolocation, pretend every computer user performing some Google search query is getting identical results.<p>Ideally that is how search should work. But Google web search is not ideal. Far from it. It is advertising company search. The goal is not to return results in a consistent, transparent manner according to a relatively simple, well-known algorithm. It is to sell advertising services. The goal is not truth. It&#x27;s money.

&gt; I had a weird experience today. I saw the forum Hackernews in my Google results<p>Click the 3 dots (kebab) beside individual search results and see if it was -<p>&quot;Personalised for you&quot;<p>This is the most likely answer.<p>[Edit] &quot;where was gta made&quot; does come back as &quot;Not Personalised&quot; in incognito mode and I see OP is in SEO.<p>I get a lot of results like this but all OPs examples seem &quot;Not Personalised&quot;

I&#x27;m pretty suspicious of any 3rd party seo tools. Only true data comes from Google Search Console or hacker news logs.