HN Explorer

Ask HN: Hacker News missing from Google results?

2 points by rpedela ↗ HN
When I search for "hacker news" on Google, this website is not in any of the results. Do others see the same thing? What is going on?

9 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 35.8 ms ] thread
dubbyDU
For me it comes up as either the 4th or 6th result depending on whether you put it in quotes or not.

Interestingly the HN article it links to is the one the other day discussing how Google paid Adblock Plus to get its ads white listed.

Peroni
If HN were a popular result, the quality of this community would rapidly decline. Eternal September etc.
rpedela
How? It is pretty clear that this website is only interesting to "hackers", and there are already a lot of people who visit the site. I think what makes HN different than Reddit or any other similar website is the rules on posting and the subsequent consequences for not following those rules. That is what encourages interesting, useful comments and prevents stupid comments like "you suck, kill yourself". As far as I can tell, the Google ranking has little to do with it.
Peroni
It's almost impossible to avoid a decline in quality as the quantity of users increases. Reddit being a prime example.

Every now and again there are threads posted here discussing the apparent 'HN decline' as the userbase grows.

rpedela
To me, those threads sound like old people complaining rather than an actual problem. "Back in my day..." You still did not answer my question: how?
gtmtg
This has been discussed before -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955043 (for the discussion) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955374 (for Matt Cutts' comment).
rpedela
Thanks! I don't why they don't limit Google, Bing crawlers to the homepage via robots.txt. Then crawling should not overload an already busy website. Honestly, it seems like an overreaction to me.