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Please don't do this. Google is already useless enough as is. New HN comments get indexed in like five minutes, but then they're gone in a month or two. Same with all content lately, it gets indexed really fast and then it's gone. It's gotten to the point where I'm looking for stuff I know exists and I know the keywords used on the page, and I still can't find it because Google just doesn't index that page anymore even though it's relatively popular. (For what it's worth, I was looking for a lecture that IIRC was submitted here a while ago that was basically a defense of pure math research in university.)

I actually used Yahoo! this week for the first time in a decade because Google just doesn't return good results anymore.



I agree. I haven't used Google for months. It's so web1.0 It's not even in the cloud. It's in datacenters! Google stopped being relevant the moment twitter burst onto the scene with its paradigm shifting earthquake. Everyone I know now just tweets people asking for stuff instead of using google. That way you get 'realtime' results - also Twitter is immune to spam or gaming. It's impossible. Either that or they go straight to WolframAlpha which has largely killed off Google in recent days.


Can you explain this more? Why would HN comments vanish? Doesn't google follow all links?


HN was not designed with SEO and linkage in mind -- after a while pages can become "orphaned" after they get pushed down by new stuff. No search engine follows all links. As a practical matter they generally give up after 6-8 links away from the home page.


Google search for this site still returns years old results:

http://www.google.bg/search?q=site:http://news.ycombinator.c...

(for better results try "800 days ago" with quotes, HN strips them for some reason)


Actually today Google seems to be indexing most of the site. But usually when I do searches like:

site:news.ycombinator.com alex3917 "rule of thumb"

Only half of those posts show up, and to find the rest I need to use searchyc.com


Personal anecdote, I have no idea if it's 100% related to OP:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576727

Now google today for "80-19-1"... it's not even on the second page (and it was the 3rd result to me too previously).

I guess OP's point is that Google is "happy" with fresh content, puts it on the front page, then the evil algorithms ;) push it farther.




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