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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I used to manage a fairly popular web site. About 30,000 unique visitors a day. Harmless content about a particular profession. Informative. Updated almost daily. Ranked #1 for dozens of terms for years and years.

Then one day Google decided it didn’t like the site and it disappeared from the results. You could do a site: search and the pages would come up, so they were indexed. But they just didn’t rank anymore. Webmaster Tools was zero help. Showed everything was normal. No errors. No oddities.

The obvious notion is that it got hacked or there was content spam or something like that, but there wasn’t. No commenting system to game. Pages were all static HTML with no ads. Not even JavaScript to screw with.

The regulars kept coming, but with no Google referrals, traffic dwindled. I eventually took it offline since it wasn’t fun anymore.

The Google giveth, and the Google taketh away.

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I of late think there is a market for an anti SEO search engine. Basically hides anything with ads and google analytics.

I don't think there is a market for something that hides at least half the internet (market meaning you can make money off it) but I think there may be people who would enjoy it.

There's https://millionshort.com/

> The search engine, which brands itself as “more of a discovery engine,” allows users to filter the top million websites on the internet out of their search, resulting in a unique set of results and placing an emphasis on content discovery. This approach to search is also designed to combat the impact that aggressive black and grey hat SEO practices have on mainstream search results.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Short

This sounds like a great idea, and something I would have used if it worked with javascript disabled.

If the owners are around : would you consider adding nojs support? I know it's an edge case request, sorry to be that guy. But then again, "search without top results" is not exactly a concept that will bring you the average web user :)

While I think this particular stance is a bit extreme I do agree that some of Google's larger signals have been heavily gamified and even though they change them up every few years they've had a hard time combating people who try to play the system. I very much think that looking into alternative ranking methods less subject to gaming is a good idea.

It's the case for pretty much all of the content that's online these days. Online reviews aren't really trustworthy, online news and social media isn't really either, nor are search rankings.

I'm not sure if there's a real solution though, pretty much every mechanism for solving this has far too many incentives to break it, so that you'd get traffic/clicks/purchases. Just too much money causes the metrics to be gamed.

I think that because there is very little competition in search in particular that they are able to rest on that -- I think if you saw real competition in the space for users that it would at least get better.

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