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Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

And let's not forget half the 'organic results' are either links to quora (for text) or pinterest (for images). Both largely behind logins.

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They even describe how to mark up your paywalled stuff to help them differentiate it from cloaking.[1]

"This structured data helps Google differentiate paywalled content from the practice of cloaking, which violates spam policies."

Which is just odd to me. Why present a paywalled search result, when the market is so fragmented that the odds the user has a subscription are so small?

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...

Feels like a no win situation for Google. Do you show results that people don't want to pay for, or do you not show any subscription needed results and people accuse you of monopoly behavior only showing sites running adsense.

Maybe a middle ground with a button for "I don't have a subscription for this site, don't show non-free content from it to me again".

One should not need to use an account for Google to basically work.

ChatGPT requires an account to work at all

So since there are serial killers it's OK for me to stab you as long as I stop there, right?

I don't see the context here but if you want: guess why I never used it.

DDG allows to to set toggles like this without logging in.

I for one am willing to meet them halfway on that. Trouble is, they won't even give me 5% of the obvious options I'd find valuable as a user.

hahah, giving the user control! Funny stuff.

Which isn't such a foreign concept for them, there's a "no toll roads" option for driving directions on google maps. Why can't search be the same?

Right? It doesn't have to fully elide the result even. If the top of the SERP said "3 results hidden because they are paid sites on your non-subscribed list" I would appreciate the info.

They used to have an option to permanently block sites from your google results. They quietly dropped it even before they dropped reader.

They had a simple rule that they index what users can see and if you try to cheat your way around that you get ranked down. Sticking to that for everyone would have been an iron clad defense against monopoly accusations. Instead they chose to help certain corporations (or at least corporations with certain business models) present different content to the bot and users.

"This structured data helps Google differentiate paywalled content from the practice of cloaking, which violates spam policies."

Which is just nonsense. A paywalled site showing different content to GoogleBot than to ordinary users is cloaking.

There was a time that Google tried to prevent SEO. Now Google hosts and attends SEO conferences.

Must be really nice being friends with Google insiders.

Add Steam forums to those. 9 out of ten times, game walkthroughs or hints can only be found on Steam, according to whichever search engine. But only if you have a login there, of course...

Since when did Steam forums require a login?

I don't think you need to login to Steam forums? Edit: Just tried. You don't need a login.

Indeed, I just checked, it's not the entire Steam community site. Looks like it's a per-subcommunity (per-game?) setting whether the community section is open to the public or not. Luckily there's a lot of content that's not behind a login wall.

Huh, if anything Google rarely returns walktroughts from steamcommunity.com for me and much prefers shoving hour long youtube videos.

The personal blocklist extension (and others, I'm sure) are good for removing sites from your results that you will never use.

Quora and Pinterest were the first to go for me.

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