This morning the site was at 5th place - and now the first link in is 8th place and a specific submission, not the home page.
What's going on?
http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3277661
A few people from Google, including Matt Cutts, are taking part in that discussion.
You can solve this by typing news.ycombinator.com in the address bar, the phrase 'hacker news' is vague enough that rightly or wrongly YC might not always hold the #1 position.
"Hacker News" is not that vague so that this site would fall from number one and some random junk site would rise on #1.
What gives?
I agree that in this case hacker news should be higher and that this is a bug. But just because hacker news is called that doesn't mean that query might feasibly be better served by another site. To assert otherwise is pretty surprising.
What I'm seeing in the results page are not those kinds of rags to riches stories. Mostly irrelevant obscure junk.
> I agree that in this case hacker news should be higher and that this is a bug. But just because hacker news is called that doesn't mean that query might feasibly be better served by another site. To assert otherwise is pretty surprising.
Also, doesn't your "second half" misses a "not"? Like:
"""But just because hacker news is called that doesn't mean that query might NOT feasibly be better served by another site. To assert otherwise is pretty surprising"".
at most 228 days ago the title tag changed from "Hacker News | $title" to "$title | Hacker News": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542
But that's quite a long time back so I'd be surprised if that has anything to do with it.
I have noticed that Google does put a huge amount of weight on domain name keywords, but thehackernews.com was registered in Oct 2010, so it's not like it's only just appeared.
Can't really see any reason for this.
Now it's 7th.
Saying that, doesn't HN block search bots from going deep? I remember reading that somewhere.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-se...
Easily, how? AFAICT, it's anything but easy.
"""I'd be interested in the reasons why you would not want to share queries and clicks."""
I don't want my preferences for naked hairy gay sailors to be known (oops, too late).
I don't like to feed marketers and advertisers with information.
I don't believe what I choose to read at home is anyone's business, so why should I treat what I read on the web any differently?
It's only a "drama" to be mocked IF you live in your own little world, and no one, bar some advertisers, ever cares about you and your opinions. And you have to be living in the right country, too.
Me, I would like to be able to do all below:
a) use the interwebs b) be vocal against my government and/or whoever I see fit (in real life) c) not have my interests easily available to anyone
As for sharing queries and clicks, everything is shared encrypted (hashes).
You're sharing hashed file fragments over bittorrent ? Do the same with queries. It's a win / win situation. Your friends and peers get higlighted results and so you do.
FYI Google and all broad range search engine do this in the background, on their servers to improve results. They use various machine learning algorithms and adhoc tweaks for this.
Sharing queries and building a P2P collaborative filter for search is just a way to expose the mechanics, with broad benefits and flexibility for users, computer scientists and hackers.
If only.
"""Use Tor and you'll be a new man."""
Yeah, like those Anonymous guys where, when the police came busting their doors down.
Tor is not a guarantee for anonymity, except if you are extremely careful about your movements. Lot's of stuff can be correlated back to you.
Bad Google, bad.