552 karma · joined March 6, 2015
You selectively left out examples like Grindsoft that gives the site a 79/100 ranking. or several LinkedIn, X or news sites that link to the site and have covered it positively.
Nevertheless, if Google uses ScamAdvisor to rank new sites (when scamadviser itself says its gives new sites lower rankings due to low age/history), then it might be time to pack the company up.
The work of a search engine is to wade through the internet and find the positive-quality sites itself.
First, a search engine indexes the web and makes it available to users. It’s been ages since Google did any of that. They no longer index sites or take ages to do so. Case in point, our cybersecurity startup (Webvetted.com) was launched in November 2025. Till date, only one page is indexed on the entire website. And I’ve talked to lots of other developers and it’s a common issue.
Secondly, a search engine organizes indexed information and makes it useful for people. Google is a basic LLM nowadays. They figured out that why organize and make the information useful when they could just answer the question with Gemini anyways? So they no longer bother to do the work of a search engine and are now just a lower-ranking open-source Chinese LLM
It’s an AI Private Investigator that does the hard work of data gathering (using Open Source Intelligence) and correlation. Used by over 70k investigators including government agencies.
but good for them that they got salesforce to buy it.
We’ve been working on a browser-based Link Graph (osint) analysis tool for months now (https://webvetted.com/workbench). The graph charting tools on the market are pretty basic for the kind of charting we are looking to do (think 1000s of connected/disconnected nodes/edges. Being able to handle 1M points is a dream.
This will come in very handy.
This was after web had to geo block China & Singapore some weeks earlier.
These AI scraping guys are destroying the web for normal folks in these countries where they run data scrapers.
what it does: you enter a name and it assembles an OSINT-style report on any Fb user. its early but it works great.
the service is a suite of online vetting and due diligence tools for website flippers, Fb marketplace sellers/buyers and Tiktok shoppers
The domain has an interesting backstory. I acquired if it n 2022 from Epik after they stole the $10,000 I had deposited into their Escrow service. The money was meant for acquiring a newish stable diffusion hosting website that was competing with civit.ai. When the Epik issue was discovered, the seller pulled out.
Acquiring that website could have changed my life.
Calling this now. This is a likely candidate for the Google graveyard.
To demand quality articles from the Internet, you must be willing to pay for them. Nobody exists just to write free passionate articles on the Internet and earn no money from them.
It will take you years to move $100k at $60 per day.
All payments must be manually authenticated. I have replied the parent comment.
Users have to manually fund their cards. This takes care of all the issues you mentioned above.
I cannot thank Hacker News enough.
Running a business all these years has been hard and full of Ups and downs. I do not recommend it for the faint-hearted. Until this morning, I had almost given up hope that our business was dead.
Thanks for bringing us back from the dead HN.
If you have ever been hacked or cannot cancel a renegade subscription, you would quickly grasp the need for Privacy cards.
Concerning the cards, we do KYC before the cards are issued and we submit same to Stripe. In extreme cases, we ask for users Govt-issued IDs. Our service might be anonymous to the outside facing world but our users are not anonymous to us and Stripe.
Finally, all bigger software shops face this issue so we are not unique.