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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the search engines (Google, Bing, DDG) could do a huge amount to combat this if they so wished.

Just check if the HTTP and HTTPS site returns near identical results (e.g. same title, response code, etc) then link to the HTTPS version by default.

A lot of links that get posted are directly taken (ultimately) from search engine results. Someone will search, view the page, then copy/paste it to others.

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Resource efficiency has a lot to do with that, I think. Crawling sites twice will add not only to the burden of the bots but the sites too. Admins may disapprove of this.

I wonder if users can be motivated to do the checking themselves when they post the link.

Could try https first, then.

While it's possible to serve completely different pages and sites on https vs http, it's rare in practice, and would be reasonable to penalize.

I think that's absolutely reasonable to penalize. From a technical perspective, returning a different resource depending on the scheme of the URI is absolutely acceptable, but from a UX standpoint it's ridiculous to have a difference between http and https.

Google has talked about doing this, but doesn't seem to have rolled it out yet.

This article from 4 days ago hints Google has finally started doing it: https://blog.httpwatch.com/2014/07/07/google-has-given-https...

Did other sites observe the same https boost recently ?

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