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Comment by Tehnix | Hacker News Reader

It would be incredibly naive to think that google does no checks on the sites they list in their searches. For one, they own Youtube and can directly look up if the video is private, and secondly, aren’t there handling of this in stuff like robots.txt?...

Edit: are we Reddit now, and downvotes are a sign of disagrement?

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>For one, they one Youtube and can directly look up if the video is private,

If Google was found to be treating their own properties differently, there would be an outcry that you couldn't believe.

Google supports the robots meta tag:

https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...

They could easily add a noindex meta tag to unlisted YT videos and then have Google Search treat it like any other site.

You could still find the unlisted videos on a page that links to them (such as a playlist). Google couldn't delist pages that merely link to noindex content, in general, without allowing everyone who can control noindex tags being able to delist any page that allows UGC with links.

Imagine if Google say "if it links to a non-public YT video we'll delist it", that's just a weapon to get pages that take UGC delisted.

Key word there is found. Look at Facebook and the whole Cambridge Analytica debacle. The outcry happens after the fact, after they're caught. Assuming the worst is no different than assuming the best.

I never use Google to search, so I get to see all the private unlisted stuff?

No, that would be a big fail on Google's side.

> aren’t there handling of this in stuff like robots.txt?...

robots.txt only describes where a bot should go and where it shouldn't go, but nothing about what it should do with the content it discovers.

robots meta-tags would be the place though.

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