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Comment by benched | Hacker News Reader

So, the best lyric site by a mile no longer shows up in ordinary Google lyric searches. As a music fanatic, searching lyrics is something I do all day long every day, by the way - and when I search lyrics in Google, I really want to go to rap genius. Anyway, supposedly this degradation of Google had to happen to make a public example, and most of us are ok with it because the founders of RG are known to be kind of jerky and unprofessional, and we loves professionalism cause the more we love it, the more it makes us look professional.

Just checking I'm still on the right planet. Yup, I definitely am.

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So, I guess the best site in any category should be above the rules then?

And come on - the idea that people only have a problem with the founders because they want to appear professional themselves is ridiculous. "Kind of jerky and unprofessional" is a staggering understatement.

> supposedly this degradation of Google had to happen to make a public example

How exactly did you come to the conclusion that this is some kind of public example?

Punishing websites that that are caught engaging in black hat SEO seems to be pretty consistent with what Google has done in the past.

And it's not like this is bad for search users because I doubt that we would prefer having link farms with useless content as the top result for every search query.

> because the founders of RG are known to be kind of jerky and unprofessional, and we loves professionalism cause the more we love it, the more it makes us look professional.

Who cares if the founders of RG are jerks or not? I'm incapable of understanding what you are trying to say here.

> and when I search lyrics in Google, I really want to go to rap genius.

So, isn't it easier (and faster) to go directly to rapgenius or create custom search keyword in the browser, than ask google for the lyrics?

when I search lyrics in Google, I really want to go to rap genius

Sounds like a wasted step. Go to your site and search it. Or has it outsourced that (/expectation) to Google?

Even then, search {site: XYZ} in the g box and be done with it.

Better yet: add RapGenius as a %s-bookmark (or Chrome calls them search engines): "http://rapgenius.com/search?q=%s"

My favorite use for this is a Google IFL search restricted to site:wikipedia.org, so now "w something" in my URL bar takes me right to the Wikipedia page for Something.

So yeah, outsourcing to Google... but fast and handy and almost always what I'm looking for.

Their search engine isn't very good, as is the case with most sites. There's a reason why everyone uses Google to find things.

Actually, I've had a chance to use it quite a few times, and I was surprisingly happy with the results. Still I might have not tested all possible scenarios (like searching for a song knowing only a part of the lyrics with some errors), so your point obviously stands, thank for pointing this out.

It's not good at matching partial words, and sometimes a song's title only contains very common words, etc. It doesn't deal well with those

Hmm, so maybe they should, like, build a better internal one for themselves, instead of trying to scam the external one they rely on so thoroughly.

People build sites that are very good all the time, often 'the best site for X by a mile', but they don't make it to the top because of poor SEO or marketing. Just because they are a good product doesn't mean they get to the top. RapGenius should be no different.

And what about the majority of people who simply want their lyrics, instead of all those messy annotations? The other sites give me that and that's why they've been at the top for the past decade.

So why not just use Google to search rapgenious? I mean if you KNOW you want to go to rapgenius, and rapgenius's search isn't good. Just use google and tell google to search only rapgenius.

If you want your results from rapgenius, that's why site:rapgenius.com exists.

Mmmm, we all love typing that.

Just add it as a custom search engine in the browser of your choice. In chrome you could just type:

rg justin bieber

You should try Bing for lyrics search. I've already made it the default engine on my phone.

Or, if you value privacy, you can use Duckduckgo.com which still ranks RapGenius plenty high.

Or even "!rg foo bar". (I typed that without looking it up, but I am sure it would work. That's how I use DDG all the time)

Who needs google? Why don't you just go directly to rap genius and bypass search altogether?

Best maybe for you. It doesn't have any of the stuff I'm listening to, so it's pretty much worthless to me.

are they only the best lyric site until they have to monetize ?

The hate seems to be coming because they're "unprofessional", "disrespectful", "juvenile" and "arrogant" - like people in the hip hop industry haven't heard that before.

Don't listen to the haters. Stay on the grind.

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