alt.hn

5/20/2026 at 4:27:25 PM

Apparently Google hates us now

 https://twitter.com/pokemoncentral/status/2057123807404638250

by zeitg3ist

5/20/2026 at 7:11:00 PM

Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think?

As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted links above the thing I actually search for. Moved to Kagi and didn't look back.

As an AI it does not work for me. I am seeing an arbitrary usage limit, refreshing in 5 hours and a weekly quota given in a percentage. That is as opaque as it gets. Again, to give Kagi as an example I look at my usage details and I see how much is remaining in a clear way. Not working for Kagi by the way, I am just a happy customer.

As a cloud storage, it does not work for me. Probably some shared folder I am working with others has a spam user and/or a hacked account and they periodically spam x-rated notifications. And that's not only me (https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1azf25v/myster...). Moved to apple iCloud and done with it.

Mail is fine. After 22 years of usage, I kind of delegated it to a non-important stage in my life. The important bits have relocated to European providers anyway.

by f4stjack

5/20/2026 at 7:28:52 PM

I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has decided to stop letting me see. (I tried DDG but for my use it's been worse than Google).

by RankingMember

5/20/2026 at 7:31:25 PM

Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com

by siva7

5/20/2026 at 9:53:54 PM

This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics.

There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts.

It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the approved Hammertech GripGlove that plays ads and is slippery.

Or you could use a random rock with a flat side, which is a much better hammer than that in every way. In the exact same fashion, Yandex blows Google out of the water. Not because they have smarter people running it or because the code is more elegant or because they have more money. They just don't have the means or motivation to actively screw with you to the same degree as Google, and that makes it better.

Anyone at this point could make a better search engine than google just by running a basic text search algorithm and not doing anything else, it just so happens that Yandex never bothered to go as far beyond that as the mainstream ones.

by pooploop64

5/20/2026 at 10:39:22 PM

Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.

by alberto-m

5/21/2026 at 4:15:29 PM

knowing the russians "work ethic" (not even sure they have a word for this), and their inability to cooperate outside close familiy and frienship, I would not trust them (I don't trust US companies knowing they dont mind and risk anything breaking basic international laws), but russian tech is just many level bellow. You should really visit russia and see how people and larger cooperation such as companies and institution are working.

by cnd78A

5/21/2026 at 11:00:19 AM

I think this way about Marginalia Search. It's just a search engine someone threw up for the sake of making a search engine and by the sake of merely not being crap it's actually pretty decent if the thing you're looking for is in its index set (lots of tech stuff). I think the most impactful thing is that it doesn't index seoslop.

by tardedmeme

5/20/2026 at 11:51:19 PM

[dead]

by andrekandre

5/20/2026 at 10:07:01 PM

Yandex is big and has probably good engineers

by ttoinou

5/20/2026 at 10:29:26 PM

I suspect it has more to do with incentives.

by amelius

5/20/2026 at 9:53:25 PM

It's not "obscure." Yandex is Russia's Google.

by ai_slop_hater

5/20/2026 at 8:13:22 PM

Not crazy, I always resort to yandex when I know google is not showing me the results I am looking for

DDG doesn’t click for me sadly, and I cannot point my finger to where or why

by seviu

5/20/2026 at 8:44:55 PM

DDG is repackaged Bing. Used to be Yandex too but sanctions put an end to that.

by kevin_thibedeau

5/20/2026 at 8:50:47 PM

We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point, let alone the vastly different UXs.

by yegg

5/20/2026 at 10:04:36 PM

I stopped using DDG because whenever I search for information on a topic like "plumber's bread" all I get are the same 1500 sites serving the same top-10 lists of the same Amazon Affiliate links. Kagi neatly avoids all of that and serves me the dumb forum articles from 2006 that I'm looking for that describe what plumbers actually do when they want to stop up a wet pipe. This is a problem with nearly every ad-supported search engine. They all serve the same dumb top-10 lists and AI-authored blog articles about the same stuff ad-nauseum instead of inferring that I'm trying to research the answer to a question. The results all presuppose that I'm looking to buy something.

by throwway120385

5/20/2026 at 11:58:06 PM

I never had this experience with Kagi, sadly. I know a lot of people here love it but I found it had the same problems as Google.

I wonder if it's a regional thing.

by AussieWog93

5/20/2026 at 9:41:47 PM

I find DuckDuckGo's search results to be terrible. I use Brave search and I find it to be the best. I've also tried Startpage and I like it better than DDG, but less than Brave.

DDG often has scam sites for example when you search for FMHY, https://fmhy.net comes up on all other search engines, but fmhy [.] click comes up on DDG.

Same with "anna's archive" returning the fake site annas-archive [.]io.

by Cider9986

5/20/2026 at 10:26:38 PM

We’ll take a look at those two sites, thanks for reporting. We’re actively working to improve how we detect and remove scam sites, and getting specific reports is very helpful.

by gtfiorentino

5/20/2026 at 10:58:15 PM

Very cool, thanks.

Here is the list of all the official sites for FMHY (https://fmhy.net/other/backups)

I'm sure they would be happy with any combination of these 3.

1. fmhy.net

2. reddit.com/r/freemediaheckyeah

3. github.com/fmhy/FMHY

As for Anna's, it changes often, but it would be good to only allow the ones listed on the Wikipedia for sites that are posing to actually be Anna's Archive, rather than accessory sites like Github, link directories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive#:~:text=URL,a...

annas-archive.pk

annas-archive.gd

annas-archive.gl

by Cider9986

5/21/2026 at 6:09:12 AM

It would be nice if DDG could get rid of the umpteen shitty wikipedia mirrors that clutter up the results.

by fanf2

5/20/2026 at 11:23:47 PM

As for my allegation of terrible results. I think it mainly comes down to low quality sites being prioritized. I didn't want to make up search queries, so I decided to just go through my history to find my searches on Brave and compare the results with DDG.

"scientology speedrun instagram"

Brave returns mostly news articles in the main results and only a specific Instagram reel. Brave has an area for videos which is particularly relevant, but DDG has a carousel thing for news. DDG returns an Instagram and Tiktok area for the topic and an X account. Then Wikipedia and Knowyourmeme.

I would say DDG actually wins here because it is very much more on topic with the social media sites being resulted (X, IG, TikTok), but the results feel less clickable to me because those social media sites are so unfriendly to adblocking, VPN using, not-signed-in users.

"fisa news"

Brave shows a really nice variety of specific news article updates as well as primary sources like a .gov. DDG does similarly, but it's really only news and it is really a smattering of different mainstream news websites. That's fine, but then there's also that carosel which is 100% filled with Yahoo and Foxnews, which I consider both to be low-quality.

Another big problem with DDG in this specific search is there are quite a few simple links to news website's tag on fisa, which isn't helpful to me.

I'm not the happiest about either results, but Brave wins because of the lack of slop from yahoo as well as the primary source results.

who is the highest level scientologist who left

Neither DDG nor Brave returns any immediate actual answers in websites, but by automatically returning the AI summary, I get a satisfying answer from Brave's AI.

"sovereignty"

I was surprised, but DDG totally wins this one. Brave doesn't have that built in dictionary result, DDG does. Brave also has a news carosel which is not relevant. Pretty comparable with the other results, but definitely a win for DDG.

Actually, what's the deal with putting the "search assist" at the bottom. That's pretty weird.

I think a lot of my bias against DDG comes from the UI. Brave seems friendlier, rounder, easier to read.

Hopefully this helps.

by Cider9986

5/20/2026 at 11:54:41 PM

Yes, super helpful, thanks. Hear you on the overall problem of lower-quality sites.

On the Assist question, it can appear at the bottom when we think it has a good answer but something else beats it. Curious what was weird about it? Just not expecting another answer?

by gtfiorentino

5/20/2026 at 9:17:28 PM

I use DDG as my daily driver and quite like it. Then again, I don't really see much difference between DDG and Kagi, so I may be some sort of pleb. I will say that, sometimes, DDG gets "stuck" on certain sorts of close-phrase matches, rather than showing me the thing I'm looking for, but I've learned to recognize that behavior and append !g to it.

by stavros

5/20/2026 at 8:47:19 PM

Well, I'd love to know; as I've said in some other comments, we've changed and improved a lot in the last couple years and so feel free to send me feedback.

by yegg

5/20/2026 at 11:59:27 PM

Have you ?

I've been a ddg user full time for 15+ years and I did see it improve quite lot over time. But quality dropped when Yandex was cut off.

Lately, I've noticed YET AGAIN being trapped in a bubble with results being to clever for their own good ... I did leave Google PRECISELY for the bubble effect ...

Not even mentioned the AI shenanigans with ridiculous results at times. DDG is not immune to enshitification. Way too many managers thinks they know better than the user ... they don't.

by ldng

5/20/2026 at 8:25:53 PM

A bet the stupid name doesn’t help.

I know what you mean though, I use it but it’s never quite right. Hard to say exactly why.

by muppetman

5/20/2026 at 8:38:17 PM

My sister thought it was malware when she was seeing ads for it. Something about the whole overall branding is just bad.

by pooploop64

5/20/2026 at 8:51:33 PM

Sorry you feel that way, pooploop64. We are doing a complete brand refresh this year though.

by yegg

5/20/2026 at 11:19:31 PM

This has me absolutely howling.

I use Bing at work for no other reason than sheer laziness, really. You've inspired me to return to DDG.

Keep on keepin on, yegg.

by kryogen1c

5/21/2026 at 10:39:52 AM

Thank you!

by yegg

5/21/2026 at 12:13:58 PM

Upon further review, I was not in fact lazy. I've been DDG the whole time.

Makes sense!

by kryogen1c

5/20/2026 at 9:45:26 PM

Dang, did I just see someone get rimjobsteve-d in the wild?

by jakeydus

5/20/2026 at 8:45:24 PM

Having a stupid name is tables stakes in the search space.

by futune

5/20/2026 at 8:24:16 PM

Someone round here said Yandex shows you what you searched for, while Google shows you what it thinks you should have searched for.

by flir

5/20/2026 at 7:20:45 PM

The promoted links have gotten insane, the first 5-6 links often appear to be ads

by andoando

5/20/2026 at 7:58:02 PM

Worse, they often aren't even relevant: we searched "passport renewal" and you had to go the the second page to even get the government site that renews passports, and not ad scams masquerading as the real thing. Optimized for engagement, presumably.

Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. I don't care if they track me. But when they have been actively try to prevent me from finding the information I'm looking for, and instead try to scam me?

by manwe150

5/20/2026 at 8:25:58 PM

> Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google.

A guess: because you type queries in the URL bar, and they're the default search engine in your web browser?

(I'm convinced that these days, this is 90% of Google's advantage)

Image search is so hyper-optimised for shopping it's useless.

by flir

5/21/2026 at 4:10:39 AM

A good guess for any phone or tablet user, but I’m technical enough to change that default. It was because their results used to be objectively better. It’s also not the default on Windows Edge, and I still remember the experiences just after reinstalling a Windows VM that I’d be confused why search results were suddenly so unreliable until I remembered I was getting bing by default.

Small update: two thirds of my device browsers no longer default to google anymore. I’ll change the rest when relevant.

by manwe150

5/20/2026 at 10:46:36 PM

Like searching for an app in the store. The first result(s) are paid promotions that often have absolutely no relation to what I was searching for.

by BLKNSLVR

5/20/2026 at 9:43:40 PM

Why don't you use an adblocker or Brave browser?

by Cider9986

5/20/2026 at 7:27:54 PM

Even after that, for whatever reason, the next tranche of links is a mixture of AI slop and shopping links. If I'm looking for information about something and not a product to buy, I often have to, gasp, go to the 2nd page of results.

by dfxm12

5/20/2026 at 9:19:55 PM

I found that if I search Google Maps for a specific restaurant, it assumes I must just be hungry in general. Just now, I looked for A&W and also got results for Tim Hortons, Popeyes and McDonald's.

Apple Maps never does that. Still, I usually use Google as I want an accurate idea of whether a business is actually open and what its hours are.

by badc0ffee

5/20/2026 at 10:04:43 PM

I just tried "McDonalds" and only got 50 straight McDonalds results. "Burger King" nets 23 Burger Kings, one "Spareribs King" and one "Burger Chicken King". Gotta love inconsistent experiences between customers / regions.

Also, Apple is gearing up to stuff ads (cough "sponsored results" cough) into Maps, at which point it will probably start suffering the same problem..

by jorvi

5/21/2026 at 2:13:57 AM

My experience with Google Maps is very different. We got burned so many times going to a closed restaurant that was open according to Google that we just use the listing to find the phone number now, and we call ahead

I know it’s probably not Google’s fault. The owner needs to update their listing, but it’s just one more little thing adding up over the years to make me avoid Google altogether

by mingus88

5/21/2026 at 12:13:37 PM

> I know it’s probably not Google’s fault. The owner needs to update their listing, but it’s just one more little thing adding up over the years to make me avoid Google altogether

The owner probably never signed up for that expectation.

by account42

5/20/2026 at 11:57:45 PM

Try searching for a type of food that has a place in it's name, like "Nashville hot chicken". It'll either center the map on Nashville, TN, and show you results for "hot chicken", or sometimes will zoom all the way out and show you results for "hot chicken" in both where the map was originally centered and in Nashville, TN.

by astolarz

5/20/2026 at 9:54:31 PM

Gmaps always zooms out when I search. No idea of that happens for others or not.

by zx8080

5/20/2026 at 9:59:07 PM

Occasionally it scrolls me over to a different continent...

by dcminter

5/20/2026 at 10:08:08 PM

Apple Maps always assumes I'm trying to get directions to a place from wherever I'm at, even if it's on another continent.

by throwway120385

5/20/2026 at 11:42:54 PM

Kagi is great

That being said a giant corporation like Google releasing free but amazing research like AlphaFold or (less so) something like Gemma is still cool. They're the ATT PAC Bell or IBM of our age it seems

by Melatonic

5/20/2026 at 10:07:09 PM

> Google doesn't work

I can relate. Just today I was working on my car and I asked Gemini how to remove the Steering ball joint. It all started well, wrote a lengthy answer and then suddenly wiped it all and instead wrote 'i can't answer that, try to ask about another subject'.

For the love of God, talking about cars are now also being forbidden by Google.

And it's not a one off, I asked multiple questions about other parts because I had a lot of issue and it was the first time removing the Gimbals and replacing the Gimbal head on that car.

Google is beyond infuriating, they are a tech company and behave like some old fashioned administration lady. Completely out of touch with real life.

On this last part, I'm convinced that it's because Google management must be completely out of touch with real life. Tech world is special, add millions on top of that..

The best that could happen to this company is to break it's monopoly so that they are forced to get rid of these lunatics.

by aucisson_masque

5/20/2026 at 10:16:26 PM

I'm surprised it's still a standard thing to let us see the message getting typed up before it's finalized. The term "literally 1984" gets thrown around a lot but wow what a dystopian feeling when that happens. It's so much creepier than if it just said "sorry that question violates our guidelines" without showing anything.

by pooploop64

5/20/2026 at 11:03:26 PM

Agreed, especially as with images it does the opposite. It waits until the image is finalised, then tests it for suitability, and decides whether or not to show it. It would be interesting to see the intermediate steps, but they're not shown.

by philposting

5/20/2026 at 11:38:29 PM

How do you use Kagi AI? I have been paying for their search service for a year now but I haven't looked into their AI offerings

by gonzalohm

5/21/2026 at 5:05:46 AM

Well, I have created several assistants for writing checks, the researcher module is really good and am using it when the need is there. It is expensive but the chained search queries it does is extensive and solves my problems so... that became something invaluable.

For the normal queries and questions though I use their cheaper selections from the normal screen. My go-to is Kimi usually and I like how, unless specified, the chats disappear in 24 hours.

by f4stjack

5/20/2026 at 7:21:15 PM

The 'mail is fine' is an impending apocalypse that most people don't think too much about. Google can dump you at any time for any reason or no reason. Your chances are small, but if it happens its incredibly disruptive. I don't know the durable answer, but I definitely need to complete that step of degoogling, the job just seems huge.

by idiotsecant

5/20/2026 at 7:23:16 PM

Get a custom domain. Strat using that. Route to Gmail to start but easily decouple.

It took me about a year of updates but now I rarely get anything to a @gmail

by yellow_postit

5/20/2026 at 9:24:48 PM

This is what I do, but it comes with its own set of problems, the most significant of which is deliverability. Some businesses can’t deliver mail to my custom domain at all (a fact I can only discover by trial and error). Some can deliver, but the forwarding to @gmail fails silently — Google just eats the mail without so much as a bounce, let alone dropping it into a spam folder.

It’s the best option we have, but it’s no solution to the crapshoot that is email today.

by nonfamous

5/21/2026 at 7:29:22 AM

"Don't anthropomorphise the lawnmower".

by globular-toast

5/20/2026 at 8:49:07 PM

Mail is terrible. The central conceit of Gmail, and unfortunately what made it immediately popular, is that you should not have to care about deleting emails because you “have enough” storage. Over time this evolved into an awful incentive structure that results in 100s if not 1000s of spam/useless/irrelevant/garbage marketing emails a day and a reminder that the next tier up is just $1 a month (for now). In the end, the state of mail is emblematic of the whole problem with that company.

by remarkEon

5/20/2026 at 9:27:43 PM

[dead]

by iv0Shandoor

5/20/2026 at 5:08:56 PM

They're a wiki. Wiki spammers are relentless now.

Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with <10k players, recently had to disable new signups, because the spam was so bad (and it was stuck on an old version of MediaWiki, which didn't have CAPTCHA-support).

On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as a source of such malware.

I imagine the fix for the OP is a thorough audit/cleansing of all malicious content on the wiki, followed by some sort of appeal to Google (which will no doubt take months, if they even respond at all, because ... Google).

Really OP's only hope is that the Google team responsible for this has an Italian Pokemon fan; otherwise they are probably screwed.

by hungryhobbit

5/20/2026 at 5:15:20 PM

We have very good anti-bot system set up with a good number of Cloudflare fine-tuned rules, limited permissions for newly created accounts, and a very dedicated team of volunteers that patrol the recent edits constantly. I cannot exclude that somewhere on a rarely visited page (out of 37k+) there is a spam link, but I doubt it’s the reason for the deindexing. I think this would also appear on the Google Search Console.

by zeitg3ist

5/20/2026 at 6:26:02 PM

I'd still recommend doing searches for common spam topics to see if you have "bad" stuff. On our wiki everything looked fine until you searched for (say) "finance" (which most users never would) ... and then you'd find a mess of spam finance stuff.

As for whether it's responsible or not, obviously I don't know. What I do know is that, without all the info, "Google saw malicious content on your wiki" is a far more logical theory than "Google just decided to hate us out of the blue".

by hungryhobbit

5/20/2026 at 7:22:53 PM

“I was having a hard time until I found a great investment advisor.”

“How can I contact your advisor?”

“Their name is <three part unique name>; just search for them and reach out.”

“Great. I found them and their results look impressive. I reached out and hope they get back to me soon.”

by sokoloff

5/20/2026 at 7:11:12 PM

If your project is popular enough to the point where tailored automation make sense there no way to fight spam really.

If its small enough you can usually avoid all the spam bots by adding any none-standard flow in registration procedure. E.g static picture or audio of something only your audience know with like drop down option to click on picture saying "I'm not a bot". Or add one more email verification for first post or edits. Or make users watch large YouTube video at certain timespamt with correct answer, etc. Anything non-standard works.

Breaks 99.9% of automation and SERP spammers wont bother create unique one for your wiki / forum / etc.

If your site is very popular you're fckd obviously and it's just arm race. This is where you can use Hashcash or something that will burn lots of CPU / GPU / RAM / etc single time so spammers will just blacklist you.

by SXX

5/20/2026 at 8:20:17 PM

I saw a comment on here a few days ago and the user mentioned that they use a Captcha AI bot in their day to day life because a solve costs $.003. So even if you had the captcha-enabled new version it might not have helped!

by 650REDHAIR

5/20/2026 at 6:00:13 PM

Do you have any basis for saying that this wiki is overrun with spam, or are you just hand-waving? They were explicit in their Twitter thread about not being full of AI slop, and that they checked their list of pages that were marked as 'crawled but not indexed' and found no abuse.

I understand that you were taken aback by spam attacks on the wiki you help manage, but it's not reasonable to generalize from yours to theirs.

by anigbrowl

5/20/2026 at 11:04:25 PM

As I said above:

>As for whether it's responsible or not, obviously I don't know. What I do know is that, without all the info, "Google saw malicious content on your wiki" is a far more logical theory than "Google just decided to hate us out of the blue".

by hungryhobbit

5/20/2026 at 6:13:29 PM

AI slop wouldn’t be on my top ten list of annoying wiki spam, having been the one dealing with such things in the past. You can be free of slop and still overflowing with spam.

by kstrauser

5/20/2026 at 7:02:04 PM

How old a version? I've been running a much more obscure game (<150 players, down from ~1k in 2010) for some time, and it was using QuestyCaptcha back in...2008 or so, I think? Certainly at least 15 years ago. It's almost always been sufficient: just put in a couple of questions based on knowledge of the game itself.

by danaris

5/20/2026 at 7:59:00 PM

Also running a wiki. Similar. Had a sign-up based on in-game knowledge. LLMs now crack it and I had to turn off signups about a year ago. Now people email me directly if they want an account.

by snovv_crash

5/20/2026 at 5:10:14 PM

Social sites should have all have a tree-based invite system. This would allow wiping out spammers and their enablers in a single hit. It would allow vetting of good actors too.

by righthand

5/20/2026 at 5:26:43 PM

I feel like the dream solution is more like tree-based content: you see content that is vouched for by people you vouch for; if someone's account is compromised then their vouches get updated to not matter anymore, cutting their whole tree off at the root to make it invisible. Spammers should end up in largely disconnected components of the trees.

by ajkjk

5/20/2026 at 6:36:36 PM

Pretty much what xwitter / bsky is on the following page. The algorithm layer atop twitter was pretty good connecting me with people/content before daddy elon came along. And this algorithm layer is actually needed (in my view) to make the social network thing work, otherwise there is no critical mass

Thankfully bsky is not that good, so I don't get hooked by it at all. But i miss it

by lgcmo

5/20/2026 at 6:06:18 PM

How does new content or content from new accounts get seen by anyone?

by anigbrowl

5/20/2026 at 6:18:02 PM

People search for a thing, find said thing, then share it themselves under their own name. You know, like how conversations work in real life

by rastrojero2000

5/20/2026 at 9:08:57 PM

A feww options:

1. get some people who trust you to vouch for you when you join (similar to requiring an invite to join but maybe more flexible?)

2. some kind of induction process, maybe the algorithm surfaces your stuff and gets feedback, like the 'new' queue on HN

3. same as before but the AI tries to do it (scary though)

4. use the same account as on other sites, or otherwise tie it to a global reputation or something you had to invest a fair amount to build. Not great for privacy but I think it has to happen eventually; otherwise new accounts are too cheap to make.

Regardless, once you're in the system your credibility is only as good as your contributions, so you should be filtered out again if you're nefarious.

by ajkjk

5/20/2026 at 10:19:38 PM

I think the deeper problem is: How would legitimate new person with no reputation and no contacts be able to get a foothold at all if there are masses of bots pretending to be exactly such a person?

A system which looks more at the content that is posted (probably using AI) and tries to decide whether it is spam feels fairer to me than effectively pulling up the ladder on new users.

by xg15

5/20/2026 at 7:11:04 PM

Same tree that gave them credentials gives them weight that is used to spread their content.

New User problem has been around for a minute though - wikipedia and stack overflow both faced it, as does every social media platform nowadays.

Reality is, though, new visitors are getting the same blast radius as early adopters got when they started, just that the early adopters now have blast radiuses that are much bigger

by awesome_dude

5/20/2026 at 6:17:28 PM

iykyk rules

by j-bos

5/21/2026 at 12:17:03 AM

This is what private trackers do, but you end up with ego moderators and weird trust issues.

by HDBaseT

5/20/2026 at 5:17:40 PM

You still need criteria to handle reputation: does an account invited years ago and now spamming affects the reputation of the inviter, how much? What about the hacked accounts?

For small platforms it makes a lot of sense, for larger the potential for abuse is still there in different forms.

by Sayrus

5/20/2026 at 6:38:10 PM

It doesn't solve as much as it sounds.

- You can't vouch for downstream invites, so the tree aspect isn't useful.

- It's not your fault if someone's account gets taken over by a spammer.

- Just because you vouched for someone once doesn't mean you vouch for them in the future.

- What should the punishment be if you accidentally invite a bad actor?

- Your community has to be large and desirable enough for people to bother. The vast majority of sites will die before anyone cares about jumping through hoops.

Addressing issues like these ends up kinda defeating the ideals of the proposal and regresses it into a mechanic that simply makes it harder to register. Which might be useful wrt anti-spam, but it has its own issues, like people having to constantly grovel for invites, shutting out earnest contributors, etc.

by hombre_fatal

5/20/2026 at 7:25:14 PM

In the "real" world we keep our relationship bubbles to a small number for just this reason - we have our close relationships, the people we trust, and then we have gradually less and less close relationships - people we know to greet, or know have done x or y or z

We know that people who are on our outer orbits should not be shared with in certain ways.

Our communities are in fact lots of overlapping bubbles, x knows y, and y knows z, but x sees them as a stranger.

The internet changes that dynamic, and we don't yet know how to manage it - we cannot all live in the town square, and we know to be very careful there, pickpockets, thieves, and robbers abound - and we have no idea who is who

Again our historical approach has been places like universities, where we have "trusted" advisors (teachers) who guide us on subjects being discussed openly - but who also ensure that we avoid pitfalls, like heated debates where people abandon logic and instead use rhetoric or violence, and who ensure that commercial interests are managed - that is, some advertisements are allowed, but unauthorised advertising is forbidden

That approach (moderation) has its own set of problems

by awesome_dude

5/21/2026 at 2:33:45 PM

Apply whatever rules, caveats, and process you want. I never said an invite tree was an automated one stop shop solution. Just that it’s useful for identifying spammers and how they’re connected. Stop trying to design a single one size fits all solution for every problem angle and you will see rules and systems working together.

by righthand

5/20/2026 at 10:23:17 PM

I don't think so. "sleeper" accounts are a thing. A more sophisticated spammer could create a "high-reputation" account over some time that only posts useful info, then turn up the spam after the trust level is high enough - or even turn the tree system into a business opportunity and sell vouches to other spammers.

by xg15

5/20/2026 at 5:39:29 PM

Now you just created a market for farmed "legit" accounts.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 6:27:56 PM

Yes, but the site operator can significantly increase the market price for such an account. This makes spamming more expensive.

by dantillberg

5/20/2026 at 7:40:18 PM

Blue tick accounts :)

by awesome_dude

5/20/2026 at 5:12:21 PM

That’s literally how Facebook started

I remember begging my older step brother for an invite since he had the college email to get in

by charliebwrites

5/20/2026 at 6:50:34 PM

Then it’s just hacked account whack-a-mole and deciding who legitimately got their account hacked and who is lying.

It raises the bar at least somewhat though!

by phil21

5/20/2026 at 5:14:52 PM

Interesting to compare this site and lobste.rs for that

by CalRobert

5/20/2026 at 5:17:32 PM

Both from safety and volume perspectives, I’d imagine. Openness has value.

by threecheese

5/20/2026 at 7:14:42 PM

I find myself much more interested in the conversations here, but I enjoy the more tangential discussions.

by CalRobert

5/20/2026 at 6:45:33 PM

Yes Lobste.rs is great but much more limited in conversational scope. I don’t think the content on each site is directly comparable. The sites are not equal in audience and intention. For example, Lobste.rs doesn’t allow rampant evangelism or want to attract start-ups and thus doesn’t attract a more “spammy” crowd.

Lobste.rs has an invite based system however.

by righthand

5/20/2026 at 5:14:03 PM

[dead]

by bogota

5/20/2026 at 5:29:31 PM

An organization I'm involved with has had to add Anubis (https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis) because of the recent wiki attacks from LLM scrapers. It's finally fixed our outages.

by teaearlgraycold

5/20/2026 at 5:10:03 PM

To be honest it's probably just jank on Google's end.

There's a lot of delayed cause and effect in search, and it's much easier to make a minor mistake that excludes 0.1% of websites from crawling or indexing than it is to detect that it's happened except from affected websites telling you about it.

Like in marginalia I've had a bug that affected websites in the condition that if the root path didn't support HEAD, but did support GET with a `Range` header, and it correctly responded with a HTTP 206, then the website wouldn't be indexed because some code that was testing the root document for issues as an initial probe handled that as an error state. Most websites that support range requests also support HEAD (as this usually means the document isn't generated). Except a handful of Caddy-based configurations, about 0.3% of servers.

by marginalia_nu

5/20/2026 at 8:13:24 PM

Or just some AI flagging it as some sort of content they don't want to show. There's no way they can be perfect at that.

by nitwit005

5/20/2026 at 7:29:13 PM

from 511k indexed paged to just 11? that is some serious jank

by bradleykingz

5/20/2026 at 7:37:22 PM

From the perspective of a web search engine indexing tens to hundreds of billions of documents 500k docs is not very noticeable.

by marginalia_nu

5/20/2026 at 5:29:13 PM

Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.

by phyzix5761

5/20/2026 at 6:23:21 PM

Personifying Google in this way is not realistic. The search team alone at Google is made of thousands of people who are all working on different things with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less. Any release from any of those people could have created a side effect of this kind. Is there a chance it was an intentional policy implementation? Sure. But the odds are heavily against it.

by twodave

5/20/2026 at 6:40:17 PM

This seems akin to saying that humans shouldn't be personified because their brains are made of millions of neurons that are all doing different things. But the actions or motives of individual processing units are hardly relevant, especially at the scale of The Google. We don't need to speculate how non-malevolent individuals cause harmful side effects. It doesn't even matter what The Google "thinks". The system is what it does, and what it does is consistently operate in ways that are not for the mere benefit of users of the Web. The conceptual model that The Google hates (or is callously indifferent to) us makes far better predictions than a model presuming thousands of people make mistakes while trying to make the Web more accessible. It doesn't matter if the former model isn't a technically perfect reflection of reality. We are less likely to be victim to The Google when we act as if it is a hostile force. Diffusing the results of its actions across thousands of nameless humans increases the risk that one finds themself posting on HN or X about how The Google spontaneously locked them out of their entire life.

by ravenstine

5/20/2026 at 7:23:50 PM

Someone at Google are ultimately responsible for the overall direction. Saying that a company is made up by thousands of people and they should be judge, perhaps not individually, but at least not as one gigant whole, is asking the employees to absorb moral responsibility, while the corporate is excused of any wrong doing.

by mrweasel

5/20/2026 at 11:04:18 PM

No, I think the company has plenty of responsibility. I just think it is more likely as someone who has been part of many engineering orgs that this is a latent bug affecting some people than some intentional change of policy.

by twodave

5/20/2026 at 7:01:20 PM

Is this irony? Cause there’s no way anyone believes these “we want to make the world a better place” cliches anymore lol

by bartekpacia

5/20/2026 at 7:46:37 PM

> over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less

Right, that's why they pushed AMP and upranked AMP pages in their results. That's also why they decided to severely neuter/remove as blocking extensions for Chrome. That's also probably why google search results are getting worse by the month with more and more ads and spam being upranked to the top.

It's because google has a mission of making the web more accessible. Okay bud.

by aleqs

5/20/2026 at 6:50:03 PM

It's laughable to assume good intentions at this point, this predatory monopolist makes every decision against a free and open internet and in favor of monetization, authoritarianism, and enshittification.

by elphinstone

5/20/2026 at 7:03:02 PM

The over arching mission is to make profit.

And accessibility was meant for Google so they can collect all the data to make even more profit.

by croes

5/20/2026 at 9:28:13 PM

sweet summer child,

> thousands of people who are all working on different things

those thousands of people aren't making the overall decisions

> with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible

google's mission has for a long time now been to deliver value to its shareholders; making the web more accessible is secondary, nice if aligned with increasing revenue

by insane_dreamer

5/20/2026 at 6:26:06 PM

lol.

by mlinhares

5/20/2026 at 8:36:08 PM

I thought the same, isn’t a lot of this data stable and static. Why recrawl and continually index stuff that has low value if the corpus is already feature complete.

by hmokiguess

5/20/2026 at 5:47:27 PM

I was listening to David Bowie's Suffragette City as I read your comment (Apparently Bowie was a popularizer of 'wham bam, tym' usage)

by caminanteblanco

5/20/2026 at 5:40:29 PM

[flagged]

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 6:22:11 PM

Users take part and improve wikis, it's the whole model. If they don't take the adverts, they still can contribute. Googlebot isn't making edits, not even giving signal to the site about what is useful allowing the owners to hone the site.

Two ways in which issues who have adblock are better than bots.

Users will promote organically, which can win more credence than even a higher listing in SERPs. Depends if your wiki is part of building a community.

by pbhjpbhj

5/20/2026 at 6:33:52 PM

Does "users" refer to 100% of users or 0.05%?

Because while your argument sounds nice, if you break out the numbers, it becomes largely meaningless. In fact you find that the average internet user, especially in the tech/gaming space, usually contributes nothing, while watching/loading no ads and self congratulates themselves for doing so while encouraging others to do the same.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 7:13:51 PM

Does "the numbers" refer to observable data or gross generalization?

by cwel

5/20/2026 at 7:21:00 PM

[dead]

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 6:15:14 PM

Users, ad-block users, and scrapers all consume the publicly-available content whether you like it or not.

I expect the difference is that the scrapers are the most likely to regurgitate the content one way or the other.

by interloxia

5/20/2026 at 7:51:56 PM

What bizarre and absurd line of reasoning. Users who care about their privacy and opt out of downloading ads and malware are 'denying creators revenue'?

Are you denying creators revenue by not reading reading/observing every ad that comes your way and making purchases based on them? Maybe you should read/comment on HN less and focus on consuming more ads instead?

What at an incredibly stupid thing to say.

by aleqs

5/20/2026 at 8:04:14 PM

When you don't want the ads and privacy invasion, you don't visit the website. There are still honestly free things on the internet one can enjoy.

Like if a video game is too expensive for your liking, you simply don't buy it. Going and pirating it is not a valid response. You get the game and creator gets nothing. You can just stick to playing honestly free games, there are plenty out there.

This idea that digital data is worthless is stupid child logic born from when kids ruled the internet. Obviously it has value, as evidence by the very top level post I responded to.

(Also, as an aside, it's only heavy ad-block/privacy tool users who get malware and scam ads, because they have no profile and only bottom feeders bid on their views. Regular users get Tide and Chevy ads.)

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 8:13:29 PM

> When you don't want the ads and privacy invasion, you don't visit the website.

First of all, I can and will visit any website I want, and I will use an ad blocker while doing so. Second - how do you know what ads and privacy invasion a website might have before you visit it? Makes no sense.

> Like if a video game is too expensive for your liking, you simply don't buy it. Going and pirating it is not a valid response

In either case the creator gets zero $. It could be argued that pirating might actually benefit the creator more - since it would increase overall usage/adoption/prevalence of the product/game. So your argument is kinda backwards.

> This idea that digital data is worthless is stupid child logic born from when kids ruled the internet.

You keep mentioning 'kids' and 'teenagers' across your comments seemingly as a way to imply that you have some kind of greybeard wisdom and special knowledge. You don't and your arguments don't make sense - your own realization of that is probably what triggers you to call everyone who disagrees with your kids and teenagers LMAO.

And for the record - intellectual property is a made up scam, the only purpose of which is to stifle competition.

by aleqs

5/20/2026 at 8:17:04 PM

>First of all, I can and will visit any website I want, and I will use an ad blocker while doing so.

And so can LLMs, so I don't see why anyone should be upset about "stealing content"

>In either case the creator gets zero $. It could be argued that pirating might actually benefit the creator more - since it would increase overall usage/adoption/prevalence of the product/game. So your argument is kinda backwards.

So how do you decide (I'm asking you), who are the suckers who pay, and who are the ones that get it free? I say child a lot because it's really only kids who cannot see how a system like that plays out.

Just a heads up, with donation systems, typically ~1% of people convert to a donation.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 8:24:26 PM

Whoever can and wants to pay is free to pay. Everyone else is free to not pay. Not sure what the problem with that is - seems like a basic human right/freedom unless your brain is consumed by the marketing/advertising virus.

In many cases running something like an online game requires server s/infra , and also requires an active subscription - not something you can generally get around.

by aleqs

5/20/2026 at 8:46:12 PM

>In many cases running something like an online game requires server s/infra , and also requires an active subscription - not something you can generally get around.

Why would they pay for server infra or pay the devs? They should just be free to pay what they want or pay nothing at all. Not sure what the problem is.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 10:06:46 PM

They are free to pay whatever they want to pay, and the devs are free to accept/deny any work/payment they deem required.

Let me know if you need me to break it down for you further.

by aleqs

5/20/2026 at 6:10:07 PM

The difference is that I am not preventing anyone else from finding their content. I whitelist ads on sites that have good ad policies, like limiting ad size, labeling ads, and not allowing animated ads.

Advertisers only care about attention, if you don't impose editorial standards they'll contaminate your entire site.

by anigbrowl

5/20/2026 at 6:25:08 PM

In the tech space, using youtube as an example, tech youtubers, who are widely lauded, still have about 40-50% of users ad-blocking and <1% donating.

So thank you, but you are one of about 14 people on the internet who actually use a whitelist.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 6:46:36 PM

On air reads. Lift a finger for your ads. When I spent more time producing podcasts I categorically rejected (and discouraged my clients from doing) injected ads by 3rd parties. They scream “idgaf” and actual on air reads convert better anyway by huge margins in comparison.

Ublock origin et al can’t block those so there’s your solution. Don’t lazily monetize your content.

by Forgeties79

5/20/2026 at 7:25:30 PM

The actual answer is to move everything to an app and kill your API, so you control everything in a locked down environment.

This is a much bigger issue than just podcasts. It's every form of binary encoded data.

by WarmWash

5/21/2026 at 3:38:26 AM

What? We are so far off base I don’t even know how to respond here.

by Forgeties79

5/20/2026 at 6:35:08 PM

If there is any model on the internet that has proven you don't need to monetize through ads for a working business model, it's Wikipedia.

by nehal3m

5/20/2026 at 7:10:31 PM

Except that it isn't a business.

by hirako2000

5/20/2026 at 7:01:12 PM

> So same thing ad-block users have been doing for 20 years now?

Ad-block users didn't mine Pokémon Central for content, then remove them from search listings. Changing the specific criticism made to the generic "denying creators revenue" is a distortion, because they screwed over all people who wanted visitors, not just the people who wanted visitors to milk them for cash.

If I made a forum about trains because I wanted people to come to the forum to talk about trains, Google milked the forum for all of the accumulated information about trains, then made it impossible to attract new users to talk about trains.

by pessimizer

5/20/2026 at 5:57:16 PM

well I didn't downvote but there is an obvious difference in thousands of uncoordinated people doing something whenever it benefits vs. a large organization with automated resources doing things at the kinds of speeds and volumes that automation allows.

by bryanrasmussen

5/20/2026 at 6:21:10 PM

You can run unblockable ads on your site.

You just have to not use third party integrations that run untrusted code on your visitors computers.

by themafia

5/20/2026 at 6:45:50 PM

The edits are likely why you’re getting downvoted so much tbh.

by Forgeties79

5/20/2026 at 6:57:17 PM

Trust me, the downvotes were instant.

People really hate it when you hold up a mirror to illustrate a problem. They tend to reflexively punch the mirror

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 8:01:43 PM

Maybe take a moment to consider why people are choosing to use adblockers in the first place. And whether having content being monetized through and relying on ads is even a good thing overall (it's not). Advertising and marketing is fundamentally a negative for society in most cases.

by aleqs

5/20/2026 at 8:13:43 PM

>Maybe take a moment to consider why people are choosing to use adblockers in the first place.

So they can get content without compensating for it.

I've been on this train since the beginning. I was there when ad-block-plus read the writing on the wall 15 years ago and decided to make a truce with advertisers. It was clearly unsustainable for 50% of web users to be effectively parasites, so maybe we can negotiate on acceptable ad practices. But to the users, a truce with advertisers!?!? Ublock Origin was born days later.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 8:20:58 PM

Users do not compensate websites for serving ads. Your argument just doesn't make any sense.

Also - negotiating 'a truce with advertisers'? What does that even mean? Granting the ads industry even more power and control over the internet?

Can you come up with an idea that isn't a dystopian hellhole on its face?

by aleqs

5/20/2026 at 8:50:09 PM

>Users do not compensate websites for serving ads.

Are you confused or being sarcastic?

I'll admit the system is one step larger than a typical transaction, which could be hard to understand for some, but the views -> ads -> dollars pipeline is the still straightforward to understand. Maybe not. I don't know when things get too complicated here.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 10:04:38 PM

Do you understand the difference between a user compensating someone directly vs an ad agency or platform doing so?

Or do you think users actually think 'i don't want this creator to be compensated so I'll use an ad blocker'?

Let me know which part is so confusing/complicated for you.

by aleqs

5/20/2026 at 11:27:10 PM

>Do you understand the difference between a user compensating someone directly vs an ad agency or platform doing so?

No, I don't. From a business perspective its all the same revenue line item. However it does determine who I am working for.

>Or do you think users actually think 'i don't want this creator to be compensated so I'll use an ad blocker'?

I don't think they are thinking at all, besides "Wow this is cool I can bypass ads!". But I can tell you, from the creator side, it's a massive problem. 30-40% of your customers have this idea that your time has no value (and ~99% if you go the donation route, 90-95% if you paywall)

Also keep in mind, any creator can give away their work for free, but they don't. I don't think it's controversial at all to say that's intentional.

by WarmWash

5/21/2026 at 3:45:48 AM

When you upload your content to the internet to be freely viewable/downloadable by anyone - you are giving it away for free. Also realistically small artists/creators (which are the vast majority) are not making any real money from ads - it's the platforms and advertisers who are actually making most of the money and promoting the anti-ad blocker propaganda, as I'm sure you're aware.

by aleqs

5/20/2026 at 9:39:15 PM

I think a lot of us object to the opacity and scale of it all.

These aren’t simply commercials running like OTA tv in the days of old. They are basically fracking our data and then selling it to other people without any oversight or ability to stop it. You are basically under assault from the moment you walk through the metaphorical door. Why does a host need my device info, my demographics, every app I’m on, my router info, all this incredibly personal and granular data just so I can watch a damn video? They just start probing and sucking up every bit of information they can get their hands on and they put a lot of effort into making sure I don’t know it’s happening or where it’s going. I will never forget the first time I fired up little snitch mini on my Mac years ago and watched all those little lines light up like the Fourth of July.

They are the parasites when you get down to it. If the transaction was clearer and we had the ability to get out of it ultimately I think people would be a lot more willing to deal with ads. But again, it’s not simply ads. This is sophisticated network data mining and reselling that vastly outstrips the value we are getting out of visiting a friggin news site or whatever, and it happens basically every single time you travel to a URL. It’s absolutely relentless, and it certainly doesn’t benefit creators 99.99% of the time.

TL;DR: framing this as people simply not wanting to watch ads is not fair at all.

by Forgeties79

5/20/2026 at 11:33:03 PM

No, my actual framing is that people don't want to pay for what they use, and ad-block created this generational illusion that you can have things of value made by others for free, and it's a good thing.

The system would topple rapidly if people went back to paying directly.

But there is a huge caveat. The ad internet created a classless egalitarian internet where everyone can pay with attention, rather than money. Almost everyone has equal attention, not everyone has equal money. This is taken for granted, but it's very real.

A payment based internet, devoid of ads and tracking, would be back to the rich people having all the coolest services.

But nowhere in any scenario is "free riders counting on suckers to cover their costs".

by WarmWash

5/21/2026 at 12:51:01 AM

I don’t know why you’re reducing our options to so few. There are so many ways for people to make a living creating beyond advertising. It’s not even a capitalism thing, this is such a narrow American mindset, especially the idea that everyone objecting to the current state of “advertising” (data fracking and selling) is just entitled.

Also a lot of people are very happy creating things without consistent/“making a living” (or any!) compensation, but they are often exploited by large corporations that want a free ride - or worse, use them as a building block and then find ways to wall them out as they take advantage of people who would otherwise use their tool. See: the FOSS community. Where would we be without VLC?

An example I always use is the Indie rock boom in Canada in the 2000’s, which bled into the US in a very concrete way . A lot of that was actually possible because of the Canadian government funding the arts.

by Forgeties79

5/20/2026 at 7:19:53 PM

Man, I wish folks calibrated their E(I am actually wrong|downvotes). Have you considered what that value could be in this case?

by akersten

5/20/2026 at 7:37:19 PM

Creators don't get compensation when people ad-block.

Creators don't get compensation when LLMs scrape.

It's totally, and completely, unambiguous. The internet just has collective brain damage from the grassroots morals of it being formed 30 years ago by teenagers. How surprising that a bunch of kids decided that the way to save the internet was to make it better for themselves, and worse for the people who make the internet the thing they love.

Some of us have grown up now, and realize the correct answer to save the internet was to not engage with ad supported content period.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 10:22:58 PM

> It's totally, and completely, unambiguous. The internet just has collective brain damage

The point that continues to be missed is that instead of taking downvotes as validation that people simply failed to comprehend the argument you're making (they didn't), you should take them as a check to reevaluate whether your conclusion is as unambiguous as you believe.

by akersten

5/20/2026 at 11:35:48 PM

It is rock solid.

There is no way to reconcile an internet where the suckers who cannot figure out ad-block carry the overhead costs for those who do. It costs money to create the content you consume, it costs money to serve the content you consume. The internet is not some magical exemption from standard financial practice going back millennia. The cost is your burden, take it or leave it. But don't take it then do mental gymnastics about why it's not actually something you value while walking away with free, shifting the cost onto the next guy.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 7:41:19 PM

There are ways to get paid without ads and you can do on-air reads like I said. adblockers don’t impact them. You also don’t have to play Google and YouTube’s games. I’m sorry folks are caught in that arm’s race between users and Google but Google has made browsing so miserable it’s just reality.

Adblocking is basic security now. I am not compromising on it. I say this as a “content creator”

by Forgeties79

5/20/2026 at 8:07:59 PM

Please ping me when you figure out how to do on-air reads on a website.

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 8:13:39 PM

You don’t need to get sarcastic with me over this.

Content creation comes in many forms. You can also promote things in your copy. People do it all the time. Adblockers aren’t going to somehow remove your words. People disclose their sponsorships at the top/bottom of their written content all the time and frequently use affiliate links.

by Forgeties79

5/20/2026 at 9:06:54 PM

The downvotes are for the unnecessarily aggressive approach, even from people without a major dog in the fight.

by kylemaxwell

5/20/2026 at 5:08:21 PM

The same thing happened with my blog a few weeks ago. It was well referenced for years and suddenly almost all of my entries are not indexed anymore. The Search Console indicates that the URLs were crawled but are currently not indexed, and contrary to technical problems, there nothing I can do to fix it, I just have to accept that most of my articles cannot be found via Google anymore.

EDIT: I don't actually think it is related, but now that I think of it, the timing corresponds with when I started setting up TDMRep to forbid using my content to train LLMs.

by p4bl0

5/20/2026 at 5:31:31 PM

Same. I've been running a personal blog for over 20 years. Last year, I couldn't find any links to my blog on Google. Went to Google Search Console to find all my links are "Crawled by not indexed", with no reason given.

by judah

5/20/2026 at 6:26:15 PM

If Google already slurped up any training data from your site, then not indexing it probably gives them something of a moat over anyone using Google search for site discovery.

by pbhjpbhj

5/20/2026 at 5:30:40 PM

You guys made the classic SEO mistake of building a real community site instead of a Reddit thread, a coupon subfolder, or an AI summary.

Scherzi a parte, spero che possiate recuperare presto…

by paol_taja

5/20/2026 at 5:32:28 PM

Grazie! Speriamo anche noi.

by zeitg3ist

5/20/2026 at 5:40:02 PM

Wikis are just high-risk for SEO. Getting my own personal wiki to be indexed was such a challenge that I'd just about given up when a friend who is more acquainted with the whole thing helped me make sure I had all the bits and bobs in the right place. If you're not careful, people can easily put spam all over your site and then it'll really ruin your presence on a search engine.

Google is really big, though. Really really big. They're so big that not even all the people inside Google are trustworthy to them on a subject like this.

But they don't universally hate wikis and so on. It's just you have to do a lot of work and make sure you don't have spam on your wiki, and then fill in all of the information in your meta tags, and have a sitemap.xml, and all that. Here's my wiki for example: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/8/89/Screenshot_-_Goo...

by arjie

5/20/2026 at 4:56:52 PM

I can even tell you that Google hates us all

by frouge

5/20/2026 at 5:12:03 PM

Google neither hates nor loves any of us, the only thing it cares about as an institution is cramming as many advertisements in front of as many people as it can get away with to generate increasingly ridiculous piles of money.

This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.

by georgemcbay

5/20/2026 at 5:25:13 PM

Public corporations have historically been multi-cellular biological organisms made up of individual cells working toward the collective goal of continuing the organism's existence. They're probably most analogous to bee hives.

Each cell receives nourishment from the corporation in the form of monetary compensation (and other benefits). Some cells have a more direct role in the "reasoning" process of the organism than others, depending on their logical position within the corporation.

The corporations aren't sentient in the collective, though it can be argued many of their constituent cells are. The corporations are able to influence their environment using individual constituent cells to communicate with similar cells in other organisms.

Ultimately, the corporation itself has the goal of producing value for its owners, since its owners provide the working capital necessary for the corporation to function.

The methods corporations use to achieve their goal of returning value can be opaque to the owners and potentially inscrutable to the individual constituent cells. Their "reasoning" is a manifest property coming from the interaction of the cells with the environment, the cells interacting with each other (both within and outside the corporation), and other organisms.

(There's the neat rub that individual cells can be constituents of multiple organisms simultaneously, too!)

If the owners stop receiving value and withdraw their working capital the corporation becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.

Recently these organisms have become biological / technological hybrids, incorporating unconscious computational models in their reasoning process. This change increases the inscrutability and opacity of the reasoning process. It's likely the unconscious computational models will eventually be tasked with communicating with similar models in other organisms, at which point the inscrutability will probably increase by an even greater amount.

It's going to be interesting when the corporations, talking with other corporations, manifestly decide that they don't need human components anymore. All of that can happen without the pesky need for consciousness, too.

by EvanAnderson

5/20/2026 at 6:25:12 PM

> made up of individual cells

I think this analogy is flawed. Corporations cannot exist without laws pertaining to them. They're made up of _laws_. The individual components all have actions dictated to them by these laws.

> If the owners stop receiving value the organism becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.

Owners are people. They're vulnerable to sentiment. There's plenty of failing businesses with their doors open for this reason.

You're attempting to rationalize something in biological terms that's somewhat irrational in logical terms.

by themafia

5/20/2026 at 6:44:26 PM

Bottom-line-up-front:

> You're attempting to rationalize something in biological terms that's somewhat irrational in logical terms.

I'm mainly riffing for fun. I don't have any thesis, beyond just expressing a general unease for how much power corporations have to influence social discourse, laws, and public policy.

I'm using this as an excuse to play w/ the mental picture I've had for decades of corporations as Godzilla-like monsters roaming the social landscape predating, excreting, and generally smashing-up anything that displeases them while individual people look on in horror, mostly powerless.

Now that humans are bolting large computational models onto corporate governance and strategy we're entering an exciting new mecha-Godzilla realm where, likely, individual human accountability to corporate actions will be even less (though it's hard for me to believe that's possible).

re: rationality

Corporations are irrational because all the actors in the corporation, and those outside who are making the rules, are irrational.

Their irrationality, unpredictability, and adaptability to regulation, particularly when they're hulking daikaiju-like monstrosities shambling thru society wantonly smashing their tails into other institutions and social infrastructure (or mating with other entities to create super-monstrosities), is what's troubling to me.

> I think this analogy is flawed. Corporations cannot exist without laws pertaining to them. They're made up of _laws_. The individual components all have actions dictated to them by these laws.

The law is a component of the environment. The law binds the corporation together, but it also constrains and shapes how it can act. I don't see the human legal system, as it relates to corporations, a whole lot differently than the laws of physics controlling the chemistry that make biological cells work.

A big difference, though, is that corporations can allocate resources to get the law changed. They can alter their environment to suit their manifest desires. Many times they simply adapt to the law (changing business processes to achieve legal compliance). Sometimes they just act counter to the law, likely because some individual cells working in a reasoning capacity will have significant individual gain and very little individual risk (Dieselgate, or maybe the subprime crisis of 2008).

I'm particularly troubled by the Citizens United decision, in the US, because it gave corporations themselves the power of speech. I think they'd always been able to alter their environment through influencing their owners and constituent cells, but this ruling gave them very direct ability. To belabor the Godzilla analogy, we used to be able to call upon the government to battle these monsters when their destruction was too severe. Now the monsters have exciting mind-control powers that they can unleash upon the government (by way of spending on political issues).

> Owners are people. They're vulnerable to sentiment.

Some owners are people, and some of those people are vulnerable to sentiment. I don't put too much faith in individual owners to give much of a crap about what their pet corporations are doing (beyond returning value). A very small fraction of people are invested in individual corporations (and those who are invested individually in a significant manner are highly motivated to help their pet corporations adapt to or change the environment to maximize returns).

Individual people are participating in a different kind of inscrutable manifest organism (pension funds, ETFs, etc) and I don't think they think much about their ownership. Those people are, by and large, just looking at returns, if they're even doing that. I'd argue that kind of ownership by-proxy dilutes individual sentimentality to the point of making it very, very ineffectual.

by EvanAnderson

5/20/2026 at 5:53:15 PM

Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).

by fredley

5/20/2026 at 5:42:04 PM

Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Google, as a wise man once said.

by bigstrat2003

5/20/2026 at 5:14:31 PM

All large companies are sociopaths, but few tech companies treat their paying customers with the level of contempt that Google does.

by logicchains

5/20/2026 at 5:26:08 PM

I'm not sure most of those calling the shots at Google realizes they even have paying customers other than advertisers. Notably though, website publishers and consumers of their massive products like Search, Gmail, and Android are not really customers.

by xp84

5/20/2026 at 5:51:30 PM

A bit outside of HN's typical domain, but I wonder the treatment that top ad buyers get from Google.

Like if you are the VP of advertising for Procter & Gamble, and your nephews gmail account gets banned, are these guys treated so specially that they can get a white glove unban just like that? I wouldn't be surprised for Googles golden geese if they can

by WarmWash

5/20/2026 at 6:21:48 PM

I wonder about that. Part of me thinks maybe they might not bother, because what are they gonna do, just not advertise? The entire online ad market is basically Google and Meta now. You'd get fired if you pulled all your ads because Google didn't do you a favor.

But on the other hand, I think they might definitely do that kind of thing as more of an old-boys-network type thing.

by xp84

5/20/2026 at 7:06:07 PM

This. They will call up a high rank and tell them about it and then it would trickle down. It would not happen through regular support channels.

by prerok

5/20/2026 at 6:29:11 PM

I don't think that's necessarily true - some large companies are coöps, they don't seem to be sociopathic?

by pbhjpbhj

5/20/2026 at 7:07:30 PM

Coops usually wouldn't be, but they almost all went under some time back where I live.

by prerok

5/20/2026 at 8:42:53 PM

FYI Google also hates OpenCV

What used to be easily searchable (e.g. "opencv orb") now brings up pages and pages of spam sites (basically "learn opencv here!" blogspam).

Literally the first result on "docs.opencv.org" is on page 4, and points to version 3.4 (9 years old!).

The page that I want https://docs.opencv.org/4.13.0/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.ht... is nowhere to be found.

by tomp

5/20/2026 at 9:22:01 PM

I think the reading has been on the wall for some time for products that are not subscriber-funded due to enshittification. We should vote with our money and switch to better products that are customer-oriented and not advertiser-oriented.

Growing up as a teenager and young adult, I remember fondly browsing Newgrounds and being thankful to those who were paying to keep the servers running; I swore that once I got my footing and had some cash to spare, I'd be paying it forward and have been doing so for almost ten years now (took me longer than expected).

So, what I'm trying to encourage is to normalize THAT (Having X% amount of paying customers that make it possible to keep it free for those who can't pay, or to support growth), because I'm pretty sure dozens of thousands of successful careers in programming and animation were launched — or at least inspired — by wonderful sites like Newgrounds and I think that has been very much a positive net thing for society.

by rolandog

5/20/2026 at 11:33:53 PM

We've had similar issues with Openstack documentation in Google.

by jayofdoom

5/20/2026 at 6:04:26 PM

After yesterday's keynote and the changes to Search, it became clear in the near future, Google will cease to direct any traffic to websites and the search results will just become a footnote in Gemini's response.

by chakintosh

5/21/2026 at 2:42:19 PM

Wasn't that already clear 2 years ago, with introduction of AI Overview? And "Zero click search results" was a goal for Google for much longer.

by Rp8yXmdmr

5/20/2026 at 6:04:22 PM

I still have 42k page indexed, but previously I had 20k impressions per day, past week impressions started to change. And now I have 399 impressions per 24 hours :/

by _alphageek

5/20/2026 at 6:34:12 PM

Tangential: this would be an excellent time for the Kagi folks to do a Mullvad style campaign around "Remember Google before the apocalypse? Meet Kagi."

by rglover

5/20/2026 at 9:15:43 PM

It's hard to over-estimate the "crawled but not currently indexed" apocalypse that's happening at the moment.

Google is DRASTICALLY reducing the size of their search index. The reasons can be debated but the outcome is clear. A much smaller index of pages they consider to be the primary authority. Anything else they are not interested in and do not need.

by Mickelby

5/20/2026 at 5:32:14 PM

A wiki with only 11 pages?

Perhaps they will investigate why 541,000 pages aren’t being indexed. In my experience, Google provides adequate tools for identifying and resolving indexing issues.

Google won’t serve pages it hasn’t indexed. Seems they left a lot of relevant details out of that tweet.

Edit: and the most likely answer would be that their current robots.txt disallows virtually all indexing. I’m no SEO expert but entries like this seem like footguns:

   User-agent: Google-Extended
   Disallow: /
Edit 2: there’s more info in the full thread but that was only viewable via the xcancel link someone else shared (despite having the X app installed - deeplinks don’t work today). A helpful example of why X is not the best platform for sharing multi-post threads. Seems robots.txt was considered but ruled out.

by computomatic

5/20/2026 at 5:37:04 PM

In the first image you can see how indexed pages go from 40k+ to 11 in the matter of days. Further down the thread I show how 114k+ pages are marked as “crawled but not index” and we can’t understand why. The rest is stuff that is (correctly) blocked by robots.txt.

by zeitg3ist

5/20/2026 at 10:40:48 PM

I think people were fooled by the 2000s-2010s tech propaganda that the tech/internet companies in general were some sort of utopian benign benefactors of humanity.

All businesses seek to survive, and will use human goodwill until it is not needed anymore. Everyone who thought that Google was opening up the web out of the generosity of their hearts will be shocked when they "feel" nothing when that is taken, because ultimately a company cannot "feel" anything at all, so the OP headline is a silly proposition.

by atleastoptimal

5/20/2026 at 5:18:24 PM

My guess is that the combination of Wiki and Pokemon is highly suspect for Google.

The Pokemon Industrial Complex has advanced astroturfing especially on YouTube/Twitch, where streamers mention the damn things in any second episode, they "accidentally" meet people going to Pokemon conventions in live streams and so on.

Try to audit the Wiki if anyone abused it.

by astkl

5/20/2026 at 4:38:18 PM

oof that sucks; i really wish there was more info on why google decides to crawl or not crawl a page

by clacker-o-matic

5/21/2026 at 7:52:02 AM

You can click on the "xy not indexed" and you see a table with all the info

by sunaookami

5/20/2026 at 5:53:21 PM

Interesting. My small game wiki was also affected ~3 weeks ago. It doesn't even show up on Google anymore even if you directly search for the URL.

We don't get any spam since there's no public signups for editing access.

by ZeWaka

5/20/2026 at 7:34:31 PM

interesting indeed. very short sighted by google if so. before, the incentive for publishing on google was discovery... if that goes away, then what?

by bradleykingz

5/20/2026 at 8:50:52 PM

This happened to an open source project I used to maintain[0]. After years of healthy growth, traffic dropped 95%. No explanation. It then restarted to organically grow again. It's been about 3 years, and we're still get roughly 40% of the hits we used to, but we were set back about 6 years of natural growth.

[0] https://2009scape.org

by OsrsNeedsf2P

5/20/2026 at 5:50:02 PM

I suspect this is a cloudflare thing since the other search engines are doing fine. I'd look closer into your cloudflare settings and see what you can relax.

by declan_roberts

5/20/2026 at 6:37:52 PM

They sucked out all the content and then pulled the plug.

by hackerbeat

5/20/2026 at 6:58:35 PM

Google does not hate you, they simply do not care about you at all. There is a very minor difference

by Aboutplants

5/20/2026 at 7:01:18 PM

I'm not sure about that, they could do far worse than delist you if they really hated you.

by MintPaw

5/20/2026 at 7:12:23 PM

Content creators need to accept that traditional SEO is a thing of the past, because traditional search engines are a thing of the past. None of my normie friends use search engines any longer. They just ask the AI - anything and everything - the AI has all the answers they need. The best that any content creators can hope for in terms of engagement is that they were the quoted source and the user cares enough to check sources. Content creators just need to find new ways of driving engagement now, and we're never going back so there's no use crying about it.

by stronglikedan

5/20/2026 at 7:18:22 PM

Well LLMs are trained on text influenced by SEO, and they use search tools also weighted by SEO. So SEO is not irrelevant I guess ?

by Galanwe

5/20/2026 at 7:20:02 PM

Public pressure campaigns work on companies, and this situation is thanks to Google.

by j2kun

5/21/2026 at 11:20:14 AM

When was the last time a public pressure campaign caused a company to give up making money? And Google in particular? The company that bans entire GCP accounts on a roll of the dice?

by tardedmeme

5/20/2026 at 5:35:57 PM

It appears for me when I search for it. Even Gemini is cool with looking for it.

Here is a part of the Gemini result I got which was directly above the regular result link.

"Pokémon Central is a major community network and independent Italian encyclopedia for everything Pokémon-related"

Honestly, the title is super clickbait and it doesn't even reflect reality. Its so easy picking some giant entity far away and create some drama about it. Dont get me wrong, I am not a google fan, but I also dislike clickbaits and whiney dramatic claims, moreover if unverified.

by kokojambo

5/20/2026 at 6:02:53 PM

Maybe the claims in the Twitter thread weren’t clear enough; I’ve added some clarification especially for you: https://x.com/pokemoncentral/status/2057157781611024764

by zeitg3ist

5/20/2026 at 6:07:34 PM

Thanks for the clarification, the title is still a whiney clickbait.

by kokojambo

5/20/2026 at 5:39:39 PM

Do you suspect they have faked the search console screenshots as well? Make your accusation explicit.

by hamdingers

5/20/2026 at 6:11:22 PM

[flagged]

by kokojambo

5/20/2026 at 7:22:09 PM

Why not use startpage.com which is doing anonymous searches in google?

by startpage_com

5/20/2026 at 7:32:26 PM

default vivaldi engine. no complaints.

by bradleykingz

5/20/2026 at 5:39:58 PM

Google's always adjusting its search rankings, but it's rare for a legitimate site to suffer such a sudden massive hit without reason.

My first thought would be that they accidentally blocked Google's crawler (maybe through some kind of anti-AI setting?) or that Google believes that the site is serving malware or spam. Either scenario can have that kind of effect. I can see that their forum at least appears to have strong Cloudflare anti-bot rules in place, so that might be the case.

They're also using a subdomain for both their wiki and forum, which Google has been observed to punish. They might consider moving each of those to their own separate .com domain.

But aside from that usual stuff, there's one more possible reason that's specific to this site. In November of last year, the Pokemon Company rebranded their "Pokemon Trainer Club" to "Pokemon Trainer Central", which is the first result that comes up when you search for "Pokemon Central".

That change was made a few months before the sudden drop in traffic, but could still be a viable explanation here. Google does routine re-ranking on a daily basis along with occasional major re-ranking, which happens maybe a few times a year, so the delayed hit that they saw could have come from Google finally recognizing that most people who search for "Pokemon Central" are no longer looking for the wiki like was once true in the past.

https://gonintendo.com/contents/54863-pokemon-trainer-club-r...

by sitebolts

5/20/2026 at 5:47:00 PM

A blocked Googlebot would’ve caused a report of 403s in the Search Console, which isn’t the case. And the subdomain has worked perfectly fine for the last 15 years.

You may have a point with the Trainer Central rebranding, but please consider this in the context of Italian language results. It’s not about reaching the home of the wiki (which is pretty much the only page that’s still indexed), it’s all the other search queries (Pokémon names, moves, games, etc - without adding “pokemon central” even) that usually returned our wiki’s dedicated page as first result (or top 5 at least) and now those specific pages are not even indexed anymore.

by zeitg3ist

5/20/2026 at 5:54:03 PM

> They're also using a subdomain for both their wiki and forum, which Google has been observed to punish. They might consider moving each of those to their own separate .com domain.

Any sources for this? AFAIK, Google treats websites on a subdomain as a separate entity.

by 0x5FC3

5/20/2026 at 6:05:21 PM

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s...

> Things we believe you shouldn't focus on: As SEO has evolved, so have the ideas and practices (and at times, misconceptions) related to it. What was considered best practice or top priority in the past may no longer be relevant or effective due to the way search engines (and the internet) have developed over time.

> Subdomains versus subdirectories: From a business point of view, do whatever makes sense for your business. For example, it might be easier to manage the site if it's segmented by subdirectories, but other times it might make sense to partition topics into subdomains, depending on your site's topic or industry.

Doesn't quite explicitly say it treats them the same, but it kinda implies it.

by jolmg

5/20/2026 at 6:32:45 PM

Google have also blatantly lied in the past about SEO. My familiarity with the subject is about a decade old, but I don't expect Google to have improved in that regard, quite the contrary. I don't think you can take anything in their guidelines as 'truth that will help for SEO'.

by pbhjpbhj

5/20/2026 at 7:13:41 PM

Easily a legal request.

by opengrass

5/20/2026 at 5:24:25 PM

Can someone start a new Google, please? Just search, nothing more. I'm willing to pay 10 USD a month for that. API access included.

by cynicalsecurity

5/20/2026 at 6:29:48 PM

I think it's become increasingly clear that search engines, in their most basic form, aren't cut out for the internet of today. The open internet is basically dead and I see the world returning to old yahoo-like web page indexes that are manually verified and sorted

by mghackerlady

5/20/2026 at 5:48:04 PM

Kagi has been mentioned already, just to provide anecdotal reference: searching for "pokemon wiki" with the country set to Italy shows OP's website as first result.

by elaus

5/20/2026 at 5:30:08 PM

Yeah Kagi already exists luckily, it’s extremely good and worth the money.

by kevincrane

5/21/2026 at 3:07:40 AM

DuckDuckGo gives you enough control in its settings to completely filter out AI-anything in search results. I like to think it is near classic Google's levels in search result quality even though it probably isn't.

by dartharva

5/20/2026 at 4:42:54 PM

Pokemon Central runs ads (Google AdSense at that!), which is probably how they pay for everything.

Google is likely their biggest inbound source of traffic, so they're probably experiencing a marked revenue drop as well.

It's unfortunate that so many livelihoods are subject to the capricious whims of a single company. A company that is increasingly seeking to keep users on their engine without sending eyeballs or revenue to any third parties at all.

We're watching Google's "embrace-extend-extinguish" arc for the web. It's not over by a long shot, but they absolutely intend to finish the job.

by echelon

5/20/2026 at 4:52:47 PM

Hi EU. How about one of those lovely anti-trust cases?

by vrganj

5/20/2026 at 5:42:25 PM

I really hope eu can extinguish Google before they extinguish all websites. Will be an exponential death of website very soon once they lose traffic.

by skeptic_ai

5/20/2026 at 6:01:48 PM

I'm worried about the Trump/Tech-Oligarch axis interfering with legal processes in the EU and preventing needed regulation.

We should've gotten out of US dependence decades ago.

by vrganj

5/20/2026 at 4:48:39 PM

It’s why I moved to in-house advertising. It’s a lot of work, but I hope it is the right decision.

by spiderfarmer

5/20/2026 at 5:06:07 PM

Why is it a lot of work? Could you specify some off the more difficult effort? Wouldn’t LLMs help speed this up? This is the one area where I’d think Llms could really take Google down by empowering in house ad platforms.

by righthand

5/20/2026 at 5:19:55 PM

Depends on how in-house you want to go. If you go full in-house, you'll need sales staff to make deals with advertisers. You'll then need a way of hosting the media provided. You'll need a way to deal with media that does not match what you've requested. You'll need a system to allocate ad space accordingly to contracts with ad clients. It's like a whole new department in your company.

by dylan604

5/20/2026 at 5:39:46 PM

I don’t have a sales staff. I just call a company, tell them why I’m calling and what’s the opportunity, crack some jokes, get serious and make them an offer. It helps that I’m in a niche, thoroughly know the sector and that they most likely already know my websites. As long as I can get to the owner of the company, then I’m golden.

by spiderfarmer

5/20/2026 at 5:56:43 PM

Spiders Georg runs his company from a cave and buys 10,000 spiders every day; he is an outlier and should not be counted.

by egypturnash

5/20/2026 at 5:02:05 PM

Its better off if ads go away. Just use ad blockers.

by pkaye

5/20/2026 at 5:06:26 PM

We would like the wiki to be free of ads, but hosting costs at our scale are real. Since we don’t like ads either, we compromise like this: users can register for free and never see an ad (they are only served to anonymous visitors); they can also use an ad blocker and we won’t bug them about it.

by zeitg3ist

5/20/2026 at 6:35:57 PM

there are many laudable places such as yours, most auspiscious, deserving of reparations, alas such favourable anachronisms are unduly burdened .

i like to mail a fiver or two to a P.O.B.

by rolph

5/20/2026 at 6:26:37 PM

Now? Google has hated us since at least the DoubleClick aquistion in 2008. That's when people became the product

by PLenz

5/20/2026 at 6:18:18 PM

One of the sad things about this story is that everyone has to read tea leaves to guess what reasoning might be going on at Google's end. Tech companies have normalized the practice of cutting people off with no explanation, or saying 'we investigated and found a violation' without articulating what the violation is. Naturally, they want to secure themselves against abuse and people trying to game their system, but refusing to provide any information does not achieve that.

It does infuriate legitimate users, enables other kind of abuse and scamming (eg immunize yourself against delisting with this one weird trick!', link farming etc), and act as a fig leaf for abusive behavior by platform operators. Effectively, we've allowed large teach companies to act as digital dictatorships with no accountability to their customers. Yes I consider users to be 'customers' even if they're uploading content or doing searches 'for free'. If you're monetizing their activity on your platform, they are your customers whether or not you call them that to avoid legal liability.

by anigbrowl

5/20/2026 at 7:13:25 PM

They're a private company, they can ban whoever they want.

Or at least that's what I heard a few years ago when it was politically incorrect people complaining about being banned with no accountability. They're a private company, it's their servers. You may not even be paying anything. So they can do anything they want to you and you have no cause for complaint.

by Jiro

5/21/2026 at 3:28:09 AM

I hope other news/content groups start to wake up. It will be indeed a war.

by gverrilla

5/21/2026 at 1:11:42 AM

> PCW is part of the EP network of international wikis that includes bulbapedia. A lot of our content is translated from it (with permission) and is the work of thousands of human volunteers.

Oh there we go. Google's internal AI marked it as "can be 99% derived from an English source" and stopped crawling it, preferring to synthesize translated Italian responses as needed.

by phendrenad2

5/20/2026 at 5:10:39 PM

Perhaps they're decommissioning search in favor of LLM:s.

by cess11

5/20/2026 at 5:22:17 PM

That's only supposed to happen later this week.

by CodesInChaos

5/20/2026 at 5:13:34 PM

This aligns with their Google Zero doctrine, keep all info internal and make the goal for the user to hit 0 external websites.

by arikrahman

5/20/2026 at 5:15:47 PM

[dead]

by jdw64

5/20/2026 at 4:50:00 PM

[flagged]

by etgpao

5/20/2026 at 6:24:31 PM

[dead]

by Serhii-Set

5/20/2026 at 5:08:20 PM

[dead]

by esseph

5/20/2026 at 4:41:30 PM

[flagged]

by spiderfarmer

5/20/2026 at 4:59:51 PM

Title could be: Apparently Google hates Pokémon Central Wiki now

(to be clearer what the source of the post is)

by ChrisArchitect

5/20/2026 at 5:05:07 PM

No, I think "us" is apt, considering this will eventually affect all sites that rely on traffic from Google search, which is basically every text heavy site.

All we can hope for is that people will stop using search (after eventually having enough of the AI wave) for these sort of niche sites and will bookmark and access them directly in future. I don't have much hope.

by m4tthumphrey

5/20/2026 at 5:37:58 PM

I spend a lot of time wondering about the true role of search in people's lives in 2026. When I watch people use the Internet, it seems like most of them perform searches simply as fuzzy-matching navigation to the websites they use. Like the way many people use Spotlight to launch desktop apps.

I think this is because

(A) bookmarks lists are inconvenient - scrolling to find a bookmark is slower than typing "youtube" or (cringe) "bank of america" in the URL bar

(B) typing URLs directly requires precision of memory with TLDs being numerous and even things that were once predictable are now mere suggestions (e.g. is your city or town at cityofwhatever.com? city.org? city.gov? Could be anything!)

(C) related to (B) if you screw up a full URL you may well end up at a phishing site that looks like the site you wanted.

I really believe that 90% of Google and Bing searches today are probably for the names (or misspelled or partial names) of the top 100 websites.

If the dominant browsers weren't Google Chrome and Mobile Safari (who gets paid by Google for every search) browsers would build bookmarks for you of your frequently-used sites, and ordered by frequency of visits, present those for direct navigation when you type a word in the search bar, and not send any query to a search engine if you chose one of those. But all incentives point very strongly against doing that and toward sending you to a SERP with 13 ads and an "AI Overview" above the organic results.

by xp84