Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I'd just be happy if Google didn't index paid content, and if sites like HN wouldn't link to it. Posting links to paid sites is, to me, silly, because chances are that link is effectively dead to the person that follows it.

The odds of a random reader (whether from Google SERPS or HN or similar) having a subscription are very low. I don't personally know anyone that has a subscription to the top 10 paid sites, and there's quite a few more than 10.

Google used to call the practice "cloaking", and would de-index you if you presented content to its crawler that didn't match what it provided to a visitor. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

View on HN

I think there is a huge opportunity for innovation in search functionality that gives users control over the types of content they see. Imagine being able to toggle on and off paid sites, news results, or other types of results. It could be like Google Scholar or Google patents but for other interests: blogs, companies, adult content, ect

I imagine Google will eventually have to go there. If more publications move to paywalls, and the search results are almost all paywalled, surely Google would have to do something?

I would pay for a search engine that never showed me results from a set of domains that I could select. There are so many mainstream media sites that I would never read but they bury the interesting content.

I.e. "never show me NYT, Amazon, Pinterest, or any site that is a scrape of StackOverflow or Wikipedia"

Perhaps cynically, I wonder if search engine incentives have moved from helping users find the what they want as fast as possible while serving adds along the way to maximizing the number of modified searches to serve more adds

On second thought, I wonder if there are browser extensions to append these modifiers to Google search

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... is one that I have found useful.

When I'm searching on Google it is because I am looking for information on some topic. Sometimes it is just idle curiosity, but sometimes it is because I have some actual need for the information to solve some real problem where the information will save me time or money.

I don't see how it would help me if Google failed to show me information relevant to my problem just because it is paid information.

Just because you don’t subscribe to the time doesn’t mean other people don’t and therefore shouldn’t get to talk about some of their incredible investigations, or discuss a crazy business story in the journal. You and your friends are not the only consumers in the world.

I suppose that works if you and all your friends have an identical list of subscriptions.

It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion.

> It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion.

Some of the most interesting and informative things I've read on HN were comments on articles I did not read. I almost always read the comments before reading the article, and a significant fraction of the time I don't even try to read the article after seeing the comments.

> You and your friends are not the only consumers in the world.

I can use this argument against you.

Not sure why would users around the world pay for US newspapers.

> Not sure why would users around the world pay for US newspapers

They do because it’s relevant to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com