Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Should Google index every website? I think answer is historically been yes, but more and more it's becoming no.

Users of Google search want the best results, not all results. Customers of Google want their ad or site visible, not all sites.



Funny thing is that very often I am not seeing the best result. Or even good result, but some stolen or SEO optimised junk...

So to me it seems they are missing good content, not the bad.


I have a website that is #1 when it comes to the problem I'm solving. No one comes close.

Its mostly due to, its a money saving thing for consumers, and that isnt really profitable. Its low hanging fruit, and I have the best website for it. Nothing really comes close, most alternative websites make mistakes in their advice because they are using feelings rather than millions of entries of data.

Anyway, if you search specifically for my most popular metric, you will always get my website. If you google 'cheap X', you will get inferior websites.

Even with SEO optimized, there are just bigger websites that are friendlier with google, linked by other websites, or it could be better SEO. Whatever the case, it makes me wonder what kind of websites I miss because I use google.


If the site is so good other people should naturally link to it over time and the situation will work itself out.


It does, but the giants are just so much better at the simple phrase 'Save money on X'


> Users of Google search want the best results, not all results.

The ironic thing is Google is violating their earlier principles to provide "best results." IIRC, one of their big early differentiators (which they made a big deal about), was making the default query operator AND and not OR. A lot of early search engines used OR to pump up their "total hits" numbers, now Google essentially does the same thing by dropping terms from your query if the number of hits are "too low."


It's been more than 5 years since Google stopped delivering the "best results".


And now Google's version is "OR terms we think are close enough to what you mean".


The answer has not been yes historically. There's always been way more content on the web than anyone can afford to actually make (interactively) searchable. The capacity of the index is a precious resource, and selecting exactly which pages to spend that resource on was always a key issue in search quality.


They want the best results but they always get ads and SERP/SEO spam




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: