How Google Is Crushing Tuta | Hacker News Reader

How Google Is Crushing Tuta

tuta.com

35 pointsgebt12 comments

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FWIW I get tuta.com as the first result for "tuta" and "tutanota login" queries (without quotes)...

(I'm not logged in to any Google services on this machine, and sitting in the middle of Europe, if it means anything)

Yes, I get the expected results too, from the US, both logged in and from a private browsing window.

But I wouldn't be surprised that different people see different results.

I get app.tuta.com

Logged in.

First: Google doesn't owe any site any traffic regardless of how much traffic it might have received in the past.

Second: If you want https://mail.tutanota.com/login to rank for "tutanota login" you should put the word "Tutanota" somewhere in the title tag of that page.

Additionally, Google has no cached version of that page so there's probably some technical problem (if past experience is any guide, the problem is not on Google's side). https://mail.tutanota.com/ also has no sitemap.xml or robots.txt file. It is extremely unlikely this is some conspiracy and more likely some failure of the most basic SEO measures.

> Google doesn't owe any site any traffic regardless of how much traffic it might have received in the past.

If they're going to hold a near-monopoly on search, then I don't think that's true. Or, rather, they don't specifically owe anyone traffic, but drastic changes in search results -- especially when it relates to a competitor of Google's other properties -- should be subject to scrutiny.

Agree, though, that it's unreasonable to expect to come up in searches for "tutanota" when that term isn't even on the page, regardless of what the company used to be called. Before rushing to accuse Google of violating the DMA, they should have at least done a basic SEO checkup.

What is the value of the scrutiny if the underlying story is "You get the search results you get and if you don't like them you are free to use another search engine?"

It'd be one thing if there were a cartel of search engines keeping Tuta off results, but "It doesn't show up in Google" sounds more like a reason to stop using Google than an attack on Tuta.

Or really anywhere on that page! Looking at the source, I can't see it anywhere other than as part of image URLs and one comment. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to rely on Google's crawlers to locally render a PWA for indexing purposes.

> It is extremely unlikely this is some conspiracy and more likely some failure of the most basic SEO measures.

I wouldn't call myself a Google fan, but this seems like the most likely explanation. The company seems to have an axe to grind with big tech in general and Google in particular [1], so I wonder how much effort they really spent on checking their own systems before crying "DMA violation".

[1] https://tuta.com/blog/google-search-monopoly

Considering that Google is a direct competitor with Tuta in the context of email I don't see how this isn't illegal, anti-competitive behavior. Google would be stupid to blame this on their algo because that has second order consequences which would cost them more than paying a settlement to Tuta and knocking this nonsense off.

What do you mean by "second order consequences?" Also, what if this is caused by a bug in Google's search engine? Would that also be illegal? Is it anti-competitive if Google made a mistake?

Would Google really admit there was a bug in their search engine? Paid search results is what makes Google the most money. Admitting they can't deliver bug-free results causes people to lose confidence and decide to advertise elsewhere.

Is that so? How would Google search users even learn that Google search "is buggy"?

And unless search users stop using Google, advertisers have no incentive to stop advertising there.

I'd be willing to entertain a conspiracy theory if searches like "alternatives to GMail" didn't still work (and show Tuta front-and-center).

This is misconfig, either on Tuta's part or Google's (Google's search result infrastructure is distributed and sometimes a cluster just plain goes down without enough replicas to maintain the search hierarchy integrity; that isn't considered a P0 failure because users still get results back, just not the results they usually get).

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