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Comment by kleiba2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a LinkedIn account and don't really care about it. The one thing, however, that bothers me to no end is all the many, many times when a LinkedIn page comes up near the top of the results to a Google query, then I click on it, and chances are I don't get to the actual information, but to the LinkedIn log-in page.

Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault, but I assume Google's rationale is that "everybody has a LinkedIn account" so it's fine to include result pages that cannot be accessed without one.

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> Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault

It is, they’re darkpatternmaxxing.

There used to be a time sites got punished if they treated searchbots differently..

Anyone else does that and Google downgrades you, but LinkedIn and Pinterest do it, and Google keeps them at the top.

If you use kagi you can block those pages. Doesn't mean you find the information you're looking for but it does make me feel better

Increases probability if you downrank enough of the noise.

At least a Pinterest account is truly free. You're not asked to "build connections to prove your identity".

Even connections won't save you anymore. I have an account with over a hundred connections but now they want to see a government ID for whatever reason. Won't let me do anything on the website until I do.

When they inevitably do this to me, I will tell them to delete my account instead.

When I log in, I get something like this and then I close the tab and move on :)

----

Access to your account has been temporarily restricted

Why did this happen?

We take proactive actions to protect you when we detect potential unauthorized access or other activity that doesn’t comply with our policies.

What can I do next?

We first need to verify your identity to ensure your account safety. To regain access to your account, please submit a government-issued ID.

Learn more about verifying your identity.

----

I hate this, because that's probably a fake reason given by them.

Mercado Libre (the "latin american Amazon") did something similar to me: they said I enabled two factor authentication via ID, and blocked me from my account until I give it to them. After a lot of back and forth with support, they finally admitted that they picked random users for "some tests", and told me that there's nothing I could do about it. Maybe LinkedIn is doing something similar?

> There used to be a time sites got punished if they treated searchbots differently..

Google is itself deep in the darkpatternmaxxing game now as well.

Linkedin, reddit, instagram, pinterest, x, bluesky, threads, facebook... they provide a better experience to web crawlers than logged-out humans.

Does this suggest an opportunity (maybe a business opportunity) for a service that, by crawling and scraping paywalled sites, presents to the human user what bots get to see? What if this service could somehow correlate all the socials you mentioned in a single, less horrible user interface?

Xcancel before it got cancelled and I doubt anyone would have paid for it anyway

they would all try to sue you and you'd be fighting constant rate limits

That’s how paywall unlockers work

archive.is, when google served cached pages you could get the actual content from the cache, not sure if other engines still serve the page they crawled as a cache.

This is one of the services the AI companies provide: presenting you a distilled, ad-free, version of the information they've scraped. At no payment to those providing it.

It's often not just based on User-Agent, but also the Google crawlers IP range. This makes it challenging to even get the bot view.

LinkedIn was more open earlier I think they closed down much more. It seems that Google didn’t delist the profile pages.

Back when expertsexchange was consistently in the top search results, google had instituted a rule that said that the page must show content without requiring being logged in otherwise the site would be deranked. Guess they quietly dropped that rule

Oh! Does that play on words bring back memories. Along with Pen Island!

If you like, you can block it from coming up with an extension: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

The problem is really the unpredictability: some LinkedIn pages can apparently be accessed publicly without a login, others cannot. But perhaps that fact alone would be reason enough to block it entirely in Google searches?

X is the same. "Check out what [politician/celeb] said on X!!" And it's the login page.

The answer is not to sign up to X, but to learn to suppress your FOMO. Chances are it was drivel anyway. Especially true for LinkedIn.

Just replace x.com with nitter.cf

that's neat thanks

nitter.cf is a controversial one because (a) it's not real Nitter - it's an AI translation into Rust and (b) - it's run by a person who also runs a child porn site

You can use twiiit.com or xxcancel.com to redirect you to any nitter that's currently working.

I see. Had no idea. Thanks for the alternate links. More the merrier.

Try Kagi. It's definitely worth it. And you can block sites in search very easily. None of the closed content farms show up in my search results.

Second. Kagi is worth paying for, and they keep adding features that are actually useful.

I still remember the days when Google saw it as 'cloaking' when you showed different content to users and search engines. And to be honest, I'm annoyed they don't seem to do that anymore.

Like I get why they probably changed that. I suspect all the attacks from media outlets on Google for requiring their articles to be paywall free to rank in search likely had a big effect here.

But it should be simple. If you want to rank in Google, your pages should be visible to guests. If they're not, those pages don't rank at all.

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