11 ms·

Apparently Google hates us now

508 points by zeitg3ist 4mo ago

spiderfarmer 4mo ago
[flagged]
opengrass 4mo ago
Easily a legal request.
clacker-o-matic 4mo ago
oof that sucks; i really wish there was more info on why google decides to crawl or not crawl a page
- sunaookami 4mo ago
  You can click on the "xy not indexed" and you see a table with all the info
drcongo 4mo ago
https://xcancel.com/pokemoncentral/status/2057123807404638250 https://xcancel.com/pokemoncentral/status/205712380740463825...
- scrollop 4mo ago
  Thank you
  - pcdavid 4mo ago
    This might be useful: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/toxcancel https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/toxcancel (Redirects to xcancel.com (a mirror of x) when the browser is about to load an x.com page).
echelon 4mo ago
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.
- spiderfarmer 4mo ago
  It’s why I moved to in-house advertising. It’s a lot of work, but I hope it is the right decision.
  - righthand 4mo ago
    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.
    - dylan604 4mo ago
      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.
      - spiderfarmer 4mo ago
        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.
etgpao 4mo ago
[flagged]
frouge 4mo ago
I can even tell you that Google hates us all
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- georgemcbay 4mo ago
  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.
  - logicchains 4mo ago
    All large companies are sociopaths, but few tech companies treat their paying customers with the level of contempt that Google does.
    - xp84 4mo ago
      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.
      - WarmWash 4mo ago
        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
        xp84 4mo ago
ChrisArchitect 4mo ago
Title could be: Apparently Google hates Pokémon Central Wiki now (to be clearer what the source of the post is)
- m4tthumphrey 4mo ago
  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.
  - xp84 4mo ago
    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.
esseph 4mo ago
[dead]
p4bl0 4mo ago
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.
- judah 4mo ago
  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.
- pbhjpbhj 4mo ago
  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.
hungryhobbit 4mo ago
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.
- righthand 4mo ago
  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.
  - charliebwrites 4mo ago
    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
  - CalRobert 4mo ago
    Interesting to compare this site and lobste.rs for that
    - threecheese 4mo ago
      Both from safety and volume perspectives, I’d imagine. Openness has value.
      - CalRobert 4mo ago
marginalia_nu 4mo ago
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.
- bradleykingz 4mo ago
  from 511k indexed paged to just 11? that is some serious jank
  - marginalia_nu 4mo ago
    From the perspective of a web search engine indexing tens to hundreds of billions of documents 500k docs is not very noticeable.
- nitwit005 4mo ago
  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.
cess11 4mo ago
Perhaps they're decommissioning search in favor of LLM:s.
- arikrahman 4mo ago
  This aligns with their Google Zero doctrine, keep all info internal and make the goal for the user to hit 0 external websites.
- CodesInChaos 4mo ago
  That's only supposed to happen later this week.
jdw64 4mo ago
[dead]
astkl 4mo ago
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.
cynicalsecurity 4mo ago
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.
- CharlesW 4mo ago
  https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing
- kevincrane 4mo ago
  Yeah Kagi already exists luckily, it’s extremely good and worth the money.
- elaus 4mo ago
  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.
- mghackerlady 4mo ago
  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
- dartharva 4mo ago
  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.
phyzix5761 4mo ago
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.
- WarmWash 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
    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.
  - anigbrowl 4mo ago
    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.
    - WarmWash 4mo ago
      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.
      - Forgeties79 4mo ago
        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.
paol_taja 4mo ago
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…
- zeitg3ist 4mo ago
  Grazie! Speriamo anche noi.
computomatic 4mo ago
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.
- zeitg3ist 4mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
kokojambo 4mo ago
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.
- hamdingers 4mo ago
  Do you suspect they have faked the search console screenshots as well? Make your accusation explicit.
  - kokojambo 4mo ago
    [flagged]
- zeitg3ist 4mo ago
  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 https://x.com/pokemoncentral/status/2057157781611024764
  - kokojambo 4mo ago
    [flagged]
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
sitebolts 4mo ago
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-renamed-pokemon-trainer-central https://gonintendo.com/contents/54863-pokemon-trainer-club-r...
- zeitg3ist 4mo ago
  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.
  - indexaro 4mo ago
    [flagged]
arjie 4mo ago
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_-_Google_Search_Console_-_Impressions_%2B_Indexed.png https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/8/89/Screenshot_-_Goo...
declan_roberts 4mo ago
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.
ZeWaka 4mo ago
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.
- bradleykingz 4mo ago
  interesting indeed. very short sighted by google if so. before, the incentive for publishing on google was discovery... if that goes away, then what?
_alphageek 4mo ago
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 :/
- ablation 4mo ago
  Yes, search impressions have cratered. And it'll only continue as such.
chakintosh 4mo ago
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.
- Rp8yXmdmr 4mo ago
  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.
anigbrowl 4mo ago
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.
- Jiro 4mo ago
  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.
  - anigbrowl 4mo ago
    They absolutely have the right to ban people from their services. But they shold explain what terms of service were violated by what user actions.
Serhii-Set 4mo ago
[dead]
PLenz 4mo ago
Now? Google has hated us since at least the DoubleClick aquistion in 2008. That's when people became the product
rglover 4mo ago
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."
hackerbeat 4mo ago
They sucked out all the content and then pulled the plug.
Aboutplants 4mo ago
Google does not hate you, they simply do not care about you at all. There is a very minor difference
- MintPaw 4mo ago
  I'm not sure about that, they could do far worse than delist you if they really hated you.
f4stjack 4mo ago
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/mystery_google_drive_notifications/ 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.
- andoando 4mo ago
  The promoted links have gotten insane, the first 5-6 links often appear to be ads
  - dfxm12 4mo ago
    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.
  - manwe150 4mo ago
    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?
stronglikedan 4mo ago
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.
- Galanwe 4mo ago
  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 ?
- j2kun 4mo ago
  Public pressure campaigns work on companies, and this situation is thanks to Google.
  - tardedmeme 4mo ago
    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?
startpage_com 4mo ago
Why not use startpage.com which is doing anonymous searches in google?
- bradleykingz 4mo ago
  default vivaldi engine. no complaints.
tomp 4mo ago
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.html https://docs.opencv.org/4.13.0/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.ht... is nowhere to be found.
- rolandog 4mo ago
  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.
- jayofdoom 4mo ago
  We've had similar issues with Openstack documentation in Google.
OsrsNeedsf2P 4mo ago
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 https://2009scape.org
Mickelby 4mo ago
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.
atleastoptimal 4mo ago
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.
phendrenad2 4mo ago
> 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.
gverrilla 4mo ago
I hope other news/content groups start to wake up. It will be indeed a war.

508 points by zeitg3ist 4mo ago

spiderfarmer 4mo ago

[flagged]

opengrass 4mo ago

Easily a legal request.

clacker-o-matic 4mo ago

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

sunaookami 4mo ago
You can click on the "xy not indexed" and you see a table with all the info

drcongo 4mo ago

https://xcancel.com/pokemoncentral/status/2057123807404638250 https://xcancel.com/pokemoncentral/status/205712380740463825...

scrollop 4mo ago
Thank you
- pcdavid 4mo ago
  This might be useful: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/toxcancel https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/toxcancel (Redirects to xcancel.com (a mirror of x) when the browser is about to load an x.com page).

echelon 4mo ago

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.

spiderfarmer 4mo ago
It’s why I moved to in-house advertising. It’s a lot of work, but I hope it is the right decision.
- righthand 4mo ago
  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.
  - dylan604 4mo ago
    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.
    - spiderfarmer 4mo ago
      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.

etgpao 4mo ago

[flagged]

frouge 4mo ago

I can even tell you that Google hates us all

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
georgemcbay 4mo ago
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.
- logicchains 4mo ago
  All large companies are sociopaths, but few tech companies treat their paying customers with the level of contempt that Google does.
  - xp84 4mo ago
    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.
    - WarmWash 4mo ago
      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
      - xp84 4mo ago

ChrisArchitect 4mo ago

Title could be: Apparently Google hates Pokémon Central Wiki now (to be clearer what the source of the post is)

m4tthumphrey 4mo ago
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.
- xp84 4mo ago
  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.

esseph 4mo ago

[dead]

p4bl0 4mo ago

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.

judah 4mo ago
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.
pbhjpbhj 4mo ago
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.

hungryhobbit 4mo ago

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.

righthand 4mo ago
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.
- charliebwrites 4mo ago
  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
- CalRobert 4mo ago
  Interesting to compare this site and lobste.rs for that
  - threecheese 4mo ago
    Both from safety and volume perspectives, I’d imagine. Openness has value.
    - CalRobert 4mo ago

marginalia_nu 4mo ago

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.

bradleykingz 4mo ago
from 511k indexed paged to just 11? that is some serious jank
- marginalia_nu 4mo ago
  From the perspective of a web search engine indexing tens to hundreds of billions of documents 500k docs is not very noticeable.
nitwit005 4mo ago
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.

cess11 4mo ago

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

arikrahman 4mo ago
This aligns with their Google Zero doctrine, keep all info internal and make the goal for the user to hit 0 external websites.
CodesInChaos 4mo ago
That's only supposed to happen later this week.

jdw64 4mo ago

[dead]

astkl 4mo ago

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.

cynicalsecurity 4mo ago

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.

CharlesW 4mo ago
https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing
kevincrane 4mo ago
Yeah Kagi already exists luckily, it’s extremely good and worth the money.
elaus 4mo ago
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.
mghackerlady 4mo ago
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
dartharva 4mo ago
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.

phyzix5761 4mo ago

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.

WarmWash 4mo ago
[flagged]
- bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
  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.
- anigbrowl 4mo ago
  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.
  - WarmWash 4mo ago
    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.
    - Forgeties79 4mo ago
      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.

paol_taja 4mo ago

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…

zeitg3ist 4mo ago
Grazie! Speriamo anche noi.

computomatic 4mo ago

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.

zeitg3ist 4mo ago
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.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

kokojambo 4mo ago

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.

hamdingers 4mo ago
Do you suspect they have faked the search console screenshots as well? Make your accusation explicit.
- kokojambo 4mo ago
  [flagged]
zeitg3ist 4mo ago
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 https://x.com/pokemoncentral/status/2057157781611024764
- kokojambo 4mo ago
  [flagged]

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

sitebolts 4mo ago

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

zeitg3ist 4mo ago
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.
- indexaro 4mo ago
  [flagged]

arjie 4mo ago

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_-_Google_Search_Console_-_Impressions_%2B_Indexed.png https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/8/89/Screenshot_-_Goo...

declan_roberts 4mo ago

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.

ZeWaka 4mo ago

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.

bradleykingz 4mo ago
interesting indeed. very short sighted by google if so. before, the incentive for publishing on google was discovery... if that goes away, then what?

_alphageek 4mo ago

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 :/

ablation 4mo ago
Yes, search impressions have cratered. And it'll only continue as such.

chakintosh 4mo ago

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.

Rp8yXmdmr 4mo ago
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.

anigbrowl 4mo ago

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.

Jiro 4mo ago
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.
- anigbrowl 4mo ago
  They absolutely have the right to ban people from their services. But they shold explain what terms of service were violated by what user actions.

Serhii-Set 4mo ago

[dead]

PLenz 4mo ago

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

rglover 4mo ago

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."

hackerbeat 4mo ago

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

Aboutplants 4mo ago

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

MintPaw 4mo ago
I'm not sure about that, they could do far worse than delist you if they really hated you.

f4stjack 4mo ago

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/mystery_google_drive_notifications/ 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.

andoando 4mo ago
The promoted links have gotten insane, the first 5-6 links often appear to be ads
- dfxm12 4mo ago
  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.
- manwe150 4mo ago
  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?

stronglikedan 4mo ago

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.

Galanwe 4mo ago
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 ?
j2kun 4mo ago
Public pressure campaigns work on companies, and this situation is thanks to Google.
- tardedmeme 4mo ago
  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?

startpage_com 4mo ago

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

bradleykingz 4mo ago
default vivaldi engine. no complaints.

tomp 4mo ago

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.html https://docs.opencv.org/4.13.0/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.ht... is nowhere to be found.

rolandog 4mo ago
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.
jayofdoom 4mo ago
We've had similar issues with Openstack documentation in Google.

OsrsNeedsf2P 4mo ago

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 https://2009scape.org

Mickelby 4mo ago

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.

atleastoptimal 4mo ago

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.

phendrenad2 4mo ago

> 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.

gverrilla 4mo ago

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