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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I just tried going to wikivoyage.org directly and did a search for Malta there. Guess what. It works. You already know what website you want, go there. Do your business there. Cut out the middle man hoovering up your data (even though DDG isn't supposed to do that. still wasted navigation)

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Although it's true that people who know they want to use Wikivoyage can get around this, people who're searching for something like "travel to Malta" are the ones really affected by having the Wikivoyage results elided.

this is true, but if this was the case, you wouldn't be typing "wikivoyage malta" in the first place.

...yes, but again, you might be typing "travel to Malta". Wikivoyage being completely scrubbed from the index means it has no chance of helpfully showing up in those results.

but again, you are missing my point focused on making your point. I understand that this site is suddenly missing some traffic due to whatever reason nefarious or not. That's a given. Only the people using the search phrase "wikivoyage malta" would realize this. The people that search for "travel to Malta" would just get whatever results that are available for whatever reasons those are what is available. Sure, these peple might miss out on some valuable information, or they might not and nobody cares except tech nerds. The world did not stop spining on its axis because of this.

If you tell people they're missing out on valuable information and they understand the implications, I'm sure they'll start caring.

BRB gonna stare at the sky and check that the stars are still moving as expected :p

I googled "Malta travel guide" and the WikiTravel link is on page 3 of the results, the WikiVoyage one is on page 5.

I guess this is a very heavy market, and there are a lot of SEO optimized commercial pretty-looking "travel guide" sites (although WikiTravel apparently belongs to that category as well).

In principle, yes, but your point isn't relevant to the issue of Wikivoyage and other sites disappearing from search results. Someone may not even know of Wikivoyage and be delighted to discover it through a search.

I always go through the search engine to prevent the off chance of me spelling the site or tld wrong.

Especially on mobile.

For most queries, on most sites, searching sitename + query in google will give you better results than using the site's native search. Nobody is going to waste their time learning what the exceptions are.

Type WikiVoyage Malta in your browser search bar Click on WikiVoyage Malta link

Navigate to WikiVoyage Type Malta Click on Malta link

Seems like it's actually wasted navigation to visit the site first.

> I just tried going to wikivoyage.org directly and did a search for Malta there.

Or just type "Malta !wv" into a DDG search bar, which results in exactly the same, with fewer keystrokes.

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