HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is Google blocking a large part of the internet?

43 points by lampshades ↗ HN
I'm working on a new website and it has some marketing on the landing page. The product hasn't launched, but I want people to be able to sign up to a newsletter to find out more information.

I create projects here and there every other year or so, but I've never seen a Deceptive Site Warning put on any of them. Not only did I get this when I went to my site initially, I got it again when I clicked a link, in Safari.

I apparently have to verify my domain so that it's registered with Google before anyone can freely visit it.

What are your thoughts? Maybe I'm overreacting.

9 comments

[ 637 ms ] story [ 477 ms ] thread
soared
What is the url? There is a lot of documentation on warnings like that and from my experience aren't used without reason.

Did you purchase the domain from a reseller, was there content on it previously, and/or is it possible to misunderstand the meaning of the domain name?

nickphx
You're overreacting. https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search
lampshades
Interesting. I'm marked as safe here.
Berniek
Perhaps, perhaps not.

Is this a way for Google to add new sites to their search data and advertising infrastructure?

When you go to the link "Chrome and Other Browsers"(from the website above), it takes you to a page which blatantly advertises Chrome, and doesn't mention other browsers. So Google!

If it was harmless or did only what it says, wouldn't it be handled by a consortium with at least Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla and the like.

History tells us that google looks after googles income.

THENATHE
I’ve found a lot of the violations come from seemingly nowhere, and I want to think that clients in some way support the actual “scan” of the website so that in some way if you visit the domain many times when there is an SSL error or mismatch, and there are downloads that are not malicious, those two factors together make google think something is phishy. I don’t know hardly anything about cybersecurity (that part of my career is under trained and usually passed off to a dedicated person), but I have a lot of anecdotal evidence from occurrences of what seems to be that
Gustomaximus
Yep I had this happen on a multisite domain that was identical to about 100 others with the exception of logo & contact details.

I'm not sure what triggered it but on search ad campaigns google can be quite sensitive to particular words in the ad or website and largely your best changing the site than dealing with support, though in the example above google support did fix that flag.

Guest9081239812
I use Google Ad Manager for one of my projects. I wanted to post an advertisement to my Patreon page when no other ads were available. I spent a fair amount of trying to get it working but Google always flagged it as malware and wouldn't let it go live. I tried the link going to my Patreon page, to my page for Patreon plans, and tried a link to my own site that redirects to Patreon. None of them worked and I eventually gave up. What a frustrating experience when Google is happy to run all sorts of JavaScript bloated, privacy invading ads, but it blocks me from running a straightforward banner and link to my Patreon on my own website.
Giorgi
if by "large part" you mean all the pr0n and all the piracy then - Yes, those are filtered out and what you see is sterilized SEO garbage.
usernew
Pretty much every browser has a blacklist of websites, so no it's not google. The blacklists are a best-effort, and get a lot of false positives which end up pushing smaller websites not only off search results, but now "off the internet" for the majority of people who don't know better.

Of course technical people all turn this stuff off in the browser, but the issue is the browser's target audience is the woman selling tamales from a cart outside the DMV, and the 20-something who does his taxes on his phone.

Much like with email, we now have to jump through many hoops with these gatekeepers, if we want to be able to reach that tamale lady with our content. Unfortunately, the solution in place now is the only one I can think of. The other option is thousands of bad actors infecting millions of devices with botnets and stealing gramma's banking passwords.