[HN Gopher] I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source pro...
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I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
Author : devinitely
Score : 408 points
Date : 2026-03-03 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| senko wrote:
| > This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem.
|
| Sorry, but this is a SEO problem. The fake site has probably been
| linked to by a number of high-SEO outlets. What you should do is
| contact them and tell them to fix the links (to point to your
| site), which they should be happy to do.
| thepasch wrote:
| > Sorry, but this is a SEO problem.
|
| Google linking to a fake website _directly underneath the real
| project 's repository that has a real link to the real website_
| isn't a SEO problem, lol.
| beardyw wrote:
| If it doesn't work it's not SEO.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I'm not sure how relevant this is anymore, but when I worked in
| SEO/Rep Management, when a website was dinged either by google
| or by hackers, we would usually spin up a new website as an
| umbrella website for the brand, fix their old site, and create
| a few smaller websites for the brand in specific niches (like
| if the brand was a bookseller, we'd have local websites, genre
| websites, etc.), link to the new websites by the umbrella site,
| then do a link analysis of the old site, and any news media
| with high authority, we'd have them update their links to point
| to the new umbrella website.
|
| It was 100% a game of whack-a-mole. And while we were a
| reputation raiser, we were always combatting against reputation
| tarnishers. Car dealerships already have a bad reputation to
| begin with, but they hate eachother more than their customers
| hate them. They were our bread and butter. Same with
| tradespeople (plumbing, electrical, hvac, handy(wo)men).
| Hizonner wrote:
| If SEO works, that's a Google problem.
| barelysapient wrote:
| The more things change the more they stay the same.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| I'm looking at this from a 3rd party of view (definitely not
| claiming the .net "deserves" to rank higher)
|
| 1) the .net version has a couple of very high authority links,
| namely from theregister and thenewstack (both of which have had
| lots of engagement).
|
| I highly doubt it would have ranked without those links.
|
| 2) its only been a week. Give Google time to understand which
| pages should rank higher.
|
| 3) Google is biased towards sites that cover a topic earlier than
| others.
|
| I've seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive
| query years later, simply because they were one of the first to
| write about it.
|
| Suggestions: give it time. Meanwhile I would recommend linking to
| your website rather than your github everywhere you mention it,
| to give it a boost
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I've seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular
| competitive query years later, simply because they were one of
| the first to write about it.
|
| With so many copycats on the internet, first to publish seems
| like a fairly good indication of the original source. But as we
| can see here, that's not always true.
| tyingq wrote:
| Most of the problem is the "only been a week" part, likely.
| Though you're fighting an algorithm that's been patched in
| inconsistent places for all sorts of weights like "authority"
| and "quality".
|
| Thousands of little weights driven by obscure attributes of the
| site that you're not really going to figure out by thrashing
| and changing stuff.
| niam wrote:
| If it saves anyone else the effort: I went to doublecheck the
| claim that those articles cited the wrong page, and it seems
| you're correct on The Register, but archive.org's earliest
| copies of the other two articles don't seem to reference the
| impostor site. They refer instead to the GitHub.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260301133636/https://www.there...
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260211162657/https://venturebe...
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260220201539/https://thenewsta...
| Calzifer wrote:
| > 3) Google is biased towards sites that cover a topic earlier
| than others.
|
| > I've seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular
| competitive query years later, simply because they were one of
| the first to write about it.
|
| Reason why I still always get the Java 8 docs for any search.
| Annoying.
| graemep wrote:
| I think the precaution developers should take is having a
| website and adding a page to it for each project.
|
| If you must just have a repo self host it. In fact, selfhost
| the repo in any case.
| azangru wrote:
| > So I built a real website. That was two weeks ago.
|
| Is Google supposed to have drastic updates to its index over 2
| weeks?
| stavros wrote:
| The whole project is a month old, and two weeks were more than
| enough for Google to rank the fake site first, so yes?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There is significant first-mover advantage in the index,
| especially when the public is finding the initial result to
| be good enough to satisfy their questions.
|
| Google doesn't care _more_ about authoritative answers than
| the public does; the public is one of Google 's signals for
| good-quality results.
| bubblewand wrote:
| Back when they were good at being a web search, yes.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It usually takes one or two days for them to start ranking new
| pages. They're fast!
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Not these days in my experience. Maybe 5-10 years ago. I
| imagine Google is so indundated with so much spam, and AI
| slop they are being more discrimantory on what to crawl and
| index
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Uh? Yes?
| bubblewand wrote:
| Yeah, Google stopped even trying to usefully index most of the
| web around '08 or '09 or so. Was super obvious when it happened
| and it's been that way ever since. Your GitHub is up there
| because it's a blessed website, your personal site isn't and will
| struggle mightily to rank even when you search exact, unusual
| phrases on it, if it's like most of the rest of the Web on Google
| these days.
|
| Get more traffic (make sure google analytics sees it, IDK but
| that probably matters because monopoly) and it might help.
|
| Most of the other indices aren't much better. Turns out fighting
| spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really
| big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.
| huijzer wrote:
| > Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a
| combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that
| use your ad network.
|
| Plus based on the results it's not entirely clear that only the
| ad part are ads. Especially around certain topics where money
| is involved, the Google first page is often showing companies
| that could profit from traffic
| bubblewand wrote:
| Well, right, a separate problem is that some notable amount
| of Google's revenue comes from fooling people into thinking
| that ads are "natural" search results. To include an
| extortion racket where you have to pay for ad placement for
| your own exact company and product names so competitors don't
| get ads-masquerading-as-results placed above you. Plus this
| is a super-helpful feature to scammers, like it's basically
| scam enablement trust-laundering as a service. If we had a
| functioning government and market guardrails the FTC would
| have been all over them for this many years ago, besides
| which they'd long ago have been broken up into several
| separate companies and denied a bunch of the acquisitions
| they've performed.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I moved my projects on codeberg and the first results in still
| the locked github project with the link to the new one.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I would suggest just using Github Pages for the "official"
| site, for similar reasons... unless you really need interactive
| parts that require client-server... in which case you can maybe
| split between pages and your own domain. Just a thought.
| sonofhans wrote:
| This is how they get you, literally. "Too bad we've poisoned
| the public water source. How about if you buy water from us?"
| ariehkovler wrote:
| It's worse than that. There's a SECOND imitator that I actually
| stumbled on today while looking something up about nanoclaw -
| nanoclawS [dot] io - and that one's harvesting email addresses.
|
| The obvious risk here is a bait and switch, where one of these
| sites switches their link to the Github repo to point to a
| malicious imitator repo instead.
|
| One approach would be to go after the sites themselves, not their
| Google ranking. See if their hosts are willing to take them down.
| Is there anything you can assert copyright over to hang a DCMA
| request on? That's hard for an Open Source project, I guess. And
| the fake sites aren't (yet) doing any actual scamming.
|
| Good luck, though!
| yorwba wrote:
| The article says "Filed takedown notices with Google,
| Cloudflare, and the domain registrar spaceship.com"
| ariehkovler wrote:
| Yeah but you do need to hang the takedown on some technical
| reason like copyright or scamming. The issue here is there's
| no obvious victim. Makes a takedown harder.
| mx7zysuj4xew wrote:
| Since the clone site isn't doing anything obviously malicious
| like spreading malware or blatantly illegal content none of
| those parties will take any action whatsoever, nor should
| they.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It isn't doing that now, but you can't be sure about what
| they're going to be up to a little ways down the line, the
| fact that they are clearly trying to misdirect the traffic
| is proof positive they're up to no good.
|
| Just do a bit of risk assessment if something like this
| were to be shipped to people that have come to blindly
| trust the source and you'll see why letting this slip is a
| very bad idea.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Most registrars and hosts consider phishing already
| malicious, even if there's no obvious malware download or
| anything.
| luckylion wrote:
| "Phishing" has a _very_ different meaning from "offer the
| option to sign up for a newsletter", let's not conflate
| the two.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| DMCA?
| pocksuppet wrote:
| No copyright violation was mentioned here, but it's not a crime
| to submit a DMCA notice anyway because you don't know the
| difference between copyright and trademark. If you _do_ know
| the difference, then it becomes a crime to submit a DMCA notice
| about something you know a DMCA notice isn 't for, so don't
| read this comment before you submit one.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >We trust Google to surface reliable information about elections.
| Vaccines. Medical conditions. Financial decisions. And they can't
| get this right?
|
| Actually I don't trust Google and I don't expect it to surface
| reliable information. I expect it to surface information and I
| will dig through it and judge for myself whether it is reliable
| or not.
| dirk94018 wrote:
| We had a similar experience -- looks like someone used AI to
| clone our site's design and structure at linuxtoaster.com. The
| real issue Gavriel is highlighting goes beyond SEO. The cost of
| creating a convincing copycat site just went to zero. Anyone can
| feed a successful page to an LLM and get a polished clone in
| minutes. And for open source projects it's even worse -- they can
| clone your website AND clone your code, have an AI rebrand it,
| and ship a convincing-looking alternative overnight.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Extremely offtopic but I accidentally pasted the link
| linuxtoaster.com. (with the dot) and I thought it would lead to
| my search engine (DDG) or something but then the website
| opened.
|
| Then I tried opening up google.com. and this works too. I
| didn't know that websites resolve when you add another
| additional dot after TLD. This was a really fun coincidence
| type thing so I wanted to share it with you.
| TreeInBuxton wrote:
| That's what makes domains true FQDNs :)
|
| I read an interesting blog article on this a while back:
| https://lacot.org/blog/2024/10/29/the-trailing-dot-in-
| domain...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| This is an interesting rabbit hole I wasn't prepared to
| jump in. Thanks for sharing the article, the world does
| work in strange coincidences indeed.
|
| Have given a glance through it but I am also bookmarking to
| read it later once I get more free. Thanks for sharing it!
|
| From the article:
|
| > Wait, what? I can put a dot at the end of my domain
| names?
|
| This was exactly how I felt at that moment :) The article
| has started pretty nicely.
| NameNickHN wrote:
| IIRC domains names read from the right and the first dot is
| omitted. It's actually
|
| com. example.com. subdomain.example.com.
| ralferoo wrote:
| The final dot indicates that the name is fully qualified.
| Without a final dot, DNS looks up the name and if that fails,
| it tries again appending each of the suffixes specified in
| "search" in /etc/resolv.conf.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| My advice to all OSS developers: if you open source your project,
| expect it to be abused in all possible ways. Don't open source if
| you have anxiety over it. It is how the world works, whether we
| like it or not.
|
| I appreciate that you open source your projects for us to study.
| But TBH, please help yourself first.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| In particular, if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect
| Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code, and each
| tens of millions of dollars from it while you don't get a cent.
|
| There's writing code for charity, and then there's _this_.
| Charity wasn 't meant to include hyper-corporations.
| Andrex wrote:
| Maybe Stallman had something of a point...
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Stallman is always right, and HN always downvotes it.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Publicly defending pedophilia arguably isn't "right", but
| if you restrict Stallman's positions to software
| licensing, then I'd agree with you.
| ux266478 wrote:
| The only instance in which he's ever engaged in "publicly
| defending pedophilia" was in remarks he made 20 years ago
| about the innocuity of "voluntary" sex with minors. He
| has since retracted those statements and publicly
| espoused a different and more informed opinion. There's
| certainly a large amount of very low-quality journalism
| engaging in bad-faith interpretations of things he's said
| in other contexts, though these aren't serious
| characterizations, only hallucinations manufactured by
| professional scheisters to fulfill unspoken agendas. At
| this point dredging it up and holding it against him in-
| perpetuity is a bit wrongheaded.
| graemep wrote:
| Of course restrict it to his opinions on software
| licensing. I think that is the sort of thing people mean
| when they say he was right.
|
| Lots of people made similar claims. Most notably The
| National Council for Civil Liberties (now called
| Liberty), the UK's leading civil/human rights
| organisation made submissions to parliament claiming that
| sex with minors was not always harmful, had a pro-paedo
| organisation as an affiliate and give them a
| representative on the gay rights subcommittee:
| https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-
| travel/scotl... The people involved were unaffected, some
| reaching fairly high political permissions.
|
| A lot of other people whose works are respected have
| actually had sex with minors. Eric Gill and Oscar Wilde
| for example.
|
| None of that makes Stallman's opinions defensible in my
| opinion. On the other hand I am happy to ignore his
| opinions on that topic and still value his opinions on
| other things.
| ux266478 wrote:
| The entire point is of my post is that it's no longer his
| opinion.
|
| > Through personal conversations in recent years, I've
| learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per
| psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I
| think adults should not do that.
|
| https://stallman.org/archives/2019-sep-
| dec.html#14_September...
| peaseagee wrote:
| Tell that to my spouse who, at age 14, was given his
| contact card by him directly.
| corndoge wrote:
| Wow, I'd be thrilled if I met stallman and got his
| contact card at age 14!
| dTal wrote:
| I'm not following - are you implying that handing a
| contact card to someone is a sexual pass? Or is it only
| considered sexual when the recipient is underage?
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| I wish at 14 I had people of such integrity around me.
| tredre3 wrote:
| He was wrong about refusing to make gcc more modular by
| fear that it would be used to insert proprietary plugins,
| which is why llvm is behind every new language or dev
| tool now and gcc is only relevant because the kernel
| still depends on it (for now).
|
| His opinions on software have been largely out of touch
| for the past 20 years. People might yearn for his ideals,
| but it's just not the world we live in.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| I keep hearing this.
|
| Please quote Stallman's quote where he defends
| pedophilia.
|
| Not a quote of someone else saying that Stallman defends
| pedofilhia, but a quote by Stallman himself.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| He's a terrible communicator, and sort of repellent in
| person. Contrast someone like Cory Doctorow who manages
| to be right about stuff _and_ actually communicate
| effectively.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I don't really share that point. If the message is
| correct, why would the other things matter? Due to
| "social norms"? It is a similar problem with Code of
| Conducts. In general I don't care about CoCs. That does
| not mean I act in the opposite manner either - I just
| don't feel the need for CoCs.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| > why would the other things matter
|
| Because on the other end of the argument is an audience
| of human beings, not a theorem solver. Pretending that
| delivery does NOT matter, or even shouldn't matter, is
| out of touch with reality.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Nope. Stallman helped create this mess.
|
| Free software underpins all the infrastructure of
| surveillance capitalism.
| Andrex wrote:
| It underpins all software, and has wormed its way into
| Windows. I'm not sure this is as good a point as you
| think.
| atls wrote:
| AGPLv3 attempts to solve this problem, by forcing SaaS
| providers to open-source their modifications.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
| j1elo wrote:
| Depends on the needs of the licensor. AGPLv3 solves the
| problem of other players taking the code, improving it
| privately, and not sharing those improvements. But AGPLv3
| is not a silver bullet for people who write Open Source
| code and pretend to make a living from it. "Open Source is
| not a business plan".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095581
| gowld wrote:
| So? I am not about to create AWS. I'm glad people can use my
| free software on their own machines, on rented servers, or
| hosted by an expert.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| AWS can profit more from it than smaller organizations or
| individuals, making it even more untouchable by potential
| competition.
|
| A market with little competition costs you too in the long
| term.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Are you still glad when AWS starts selling you software as
| a service and make hundreds of millions and you get
| nothing?
| mkehrt wrote:
| I don't understand your point? If you write code with an MIT
| license, this is what you would expect.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Totally agreed.
|
| I find it strange that people use the MIT licence and then
| complain "big greedy corporation did not contribute back
| anything". Though I also agree that this leeching approach
| by corporations is a problem to the ecosystem. MIT just is
| not the right licence to fight that.
| nananana9 wrote:
| If you want evil megacorps to give you money when they use
| your thing, maybe say "if you're an evil megacorp you have to
| give me money when you use my thing" in the license?
|
| If your license reads "hey, you can use this however you
| want, no matter who you are, and don't have to give me
| money", people will use it however they want, no matter who
| they are, and won't give you money.
|
| Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have
| bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know
| any better into believing that an actual sustainable
| development model that respects their work is evil and that
| we should all work for free and beg for donations.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I agree that MIT may not be the best licence here in such a
| use case scenario. The question is why corporations think
| they can be leeches though - and the bigger, the more of a
| leech they are on the ecosystem. That's just not right.
| graemep wrote:
| > The question is why corporations think they can be
| leeches though
|
| because they can be. They do not think they can be
| leeches, they know they can be leeches.
|
| > That's just not right
|
| I somewhat agree with you, but they do actually have
| permission to do it.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| IMHO, this is the wrong way of looking at it. You can
| choose any license you like. Choose the right license,
| and that should be the end of the discussion.
| buran77 wrote:
| > The question is why corporations think they can be
| leeches though
|
| Because they _can_ , they don't just think they do.
| Everything about the framework they operate in allows or
| even encourages them to do it.
|
| > That's just not right.
|
| As a matter of morality, you're right. This is something
| very few people or corporations concern themselves with
| just as soon as there's real money to be made by not
| concerning themselves with this.
| sfRattan wrote:
| > Unfortunately, for decades, free software fanatics have
| bullied inexperienced and eager programmers, who don't know
| any better into believing that an actual sustainable
| development model that respects their work is evil and that
| we should all work for free and beg for donations.
|
| Silicon Valley hype monsters have done this, sure. And so
| have too many _open source software_ advocates. But all the
| _free software_ advocates I 've read and listened to over
| the years have criticized MIT- and BSD-style permissive
| licenses for permitting exactly the freeloading you
| describe.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| With the cloud, GPL won't protect you either
| dspillett wrote:
| AGPLv3 largely does, if you can and do enforce it in some
| way when breaches happen.
| vablings wrote:
| The idea that software that is free NEEDS to be open source
| because "I don't want something running on my computer" but
| then will go and download the precompiled binary hurts my
| head alot
| markus_zhang wrote:
| What if they simply use the code and don't give you the
| $$$? Are you going to sue them?
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > free software fanatics have bullied and eager programmers
|
| We must travel in different circles. I've been around a
| while, and I've never seen _any individual_ bullied for
| keeping their code closed source.
|
| That said, I have an extreme bias toward only using open
| source code, for practical reasons, and I'm open about
| that.
| frizlab wrote:
| And whatever license you use, expect it to be crawled by AI,
| and have AI provider make millions on it.
| smegger001 wrote:
| > if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to
| make a fork, not give you the source code,
|
| thats why the gpl family of license exist.
|
| MIT/BSD family licenses are do whatever you want with this,
|
| if you want to make money off of you pet opensource project I
| recommend multi-license it with a copyleft with copyright
| assignment required for contributions and offer other
| licenses with a fee.
| pfrrp wrote:
| There is even a software "law" related to this:
| https://www.hyrumslaw.com/
|
| " With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not
| matter what you promise in the contract: all observable
| behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. "
| roywiggins wrote:
| I'll be honest, I'd take this more seriously if this post didn't
| read like ChatGPT output. If you won't spend the effort to use
| your own words why should I stir myself to care?
|
| Sorry, I'll put it in hand-crafted ChatGPTese:
|
| ## The Slop Problem
|
| Every post sounds the same. No intelligence. No individuality.
| Just pure, clean LLM slop. Let's dive in.
|
| - _Every post has LLM tells_. This is key.
|
| - _Posts get upvoted anyway_. Nobody seems to notice or indeed
| care.
|
| - _People acclimate to the slop_. This isn 't just a coincidence.
| This is a real shift in standards. When people read enough of
| this, they begin to think it sounds normal.
|
| ## The Replying Dilemma
|
| Should you engage with the content, when there is a real person
| involved? On the one hand, they put their name on it, and
| probably the details are drawn from their prompt, so it can be
| said to fairly represent what they wanted to say. So maybe
| ragging on their ChatGPT prose is being mean. On the other hand,
| if nobody ever mentions this, the acclimatization will only get
| worse as the rising tide of slop overwhelms any other style of
| writing.
|
| ## The "Snobbery is good actually" Option
|
| Relentlessly bully people for their half-baked LLM copy. Make it
| your whole personality. Go insane.
|
| ## The "Giving Up" Solution
|
| Learn to stop worrying and love the LLM.
| bakugo wrote:
| The post is AI generated, the project is AI generated, the
| "real" website is AI generated, the "fake" website is AI
| generated.
|
| It's slop all the way down.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I'll be honest I really did have slightly higher hopes for
| computer-touchers when it comes to retaining cognitive
| authority over machines.
|
| Instead it seems like there's a solid core of people who have
| always wanted to outsource their brains entirely to machines,
| and have finally got their wish.
|
| I'm old enough to remember when we joked about _normies_ who
| were dumb enough to let computers think for them.
| mbac32768 wrote:
| A year ago I would have agreed but lately, when it comes to
| stuff linked off of HN, it's actually more likely to be clear
| and readable if it's AI written.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Is it more likely to be clear and reliable if it is AI-
| written, or are features associated (both directly and by
| correlation) with clear writing increasingly misperceived as
| "AI tells" because they are also favored in LLM training?
| roywiggins wrote:
| I don't find the LLM written stuff very readable because
| after one too many "real"s or "The X Dilemma" my brain shuts
| off. It's not even voluntary, it just does that on its own.
| samuelknight wrote:
| Copycats are not a new problem. You can be completely open source
| and have a trademark on the project name.
| roywiggins wrote:
| It might be mitigated a bit by having a website that doesn't
| look like AI slop, just to differentiate it from the duplicates
| which are also AI slop.
| keiferski wrote:
| Suddenly the pre-Google Yahoo model of curated links is starting
| to seem relevant again.
|
| Curation in general is probably a skill that will become more and
| more in demand as the Internet fills up with AI slop.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Unfortunately everyone here is terrible at curation, because
| this post is itself LLM output.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Losing the SEO battle is a lot like losing money on the stock
| market. The system you are fighting is incredibly efficient and
| will never in a trillion years give a single shit about your
| specific concerns. You can hire lawyers and spend time
| complaining about it all day on social media. But you'll rarely
| get a drop of blood out of this stone. The best you can do is to
| step back, reevaluate your understanding of the market, and
| adjust your strategy.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Duckduckgo actually shows nanoclaw.net as the first result and
| the github page as second.
|
| Another point but DDG's AI feature actually references
| Nanoclaw.net as a source.
|
| Damn I booted up Orion (Kagi) and even Kagi shows nanoclaw.net as
| the third result after the github page with qwibitai and another
| github page with your (previous?) github username ie gavrielc
| which when clicked on also results to the same github page.
|
| There is an interesting find page in kagi which references the
| website but it still shows nanoclaw.net page earlier and the
| nanoclaw.dev interesting find shows the .dev domain barely that
| in first time I didn't even notice it.
|
| I expected it better from DDG/Kagi to be honest. I also tried
| brave and it had the same issue. Brave even is its own
| independent index and even that struggles with.
|
| Let's hope that this can quickly get patched though. Also a good
| reminder to people to prefer opening up github links than
| websites as I must admit that even as a tech-savvy person I
| could've fallen for nanoclaw.net link as well given its second in
| like all search engines.
| cainetighe wrote:
| We can fix this quickly at DuckDuckGo, and we will for
| organics. I suspect part of the problem is I am seeing a TLS
| issue with the nanoclaw.dev site.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Awesome! I am a big fan of DDG. I am happy I could help you
| guys. Another minor tidbit but please also remove DDG AI
| summary about nanoclaw referencing the .net if you do take
| some action about it.
|
| I have also written a more detailed comparison comparing all
| search providers that I could find, perhaps it might be of
| interest to ya but only Mojeek/(yandex.ru with the
| nanoclaw.dev/ru) were able to reference it earlier than .net
|
| I have been an happy user of DDG for many time. I trust DDG
| significantly more than Google and I am happy that you guys
| could read such feedback!
|
| Have a nice day DDG team!
| cainetighe wrote:
| SearchAssist is fixed, organics are taking a bit longer.
| Thanks again for the report, we should hopefully have the
| latter resolved by EoD.
| cainetighe wrote:
| This should now be done on organics and search assist.
| Thanks again!
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I actually tried giving the query and can confirm.
| Searching nanoclaw has now removed nanoclaw.net from the
| search (although nanoclaw.dev hasn't come in the search
| results but I suppose that can happen organically)
|
| I am not the creator of nanoclaw or even related to it
| but I really appreciate how the DDG team took my
| feedback. Thanks to you as well!
|
| > Thanks again!
|
| Don't mind me if I use this comment (ie. Got thanked by
| Duckduckgo team for helping them) in anything like a
| resume haha. I am half joking but although small, I think
| that (resume?)/something similar could reflect why I love
| privacy services and if an employer can be right minded,
| it can give more talking points and maybe even a
| discussion starter. So I might be only half joking when I
| say this haha!
|
| I am really happy too that I can be of help. I love the
| work done at Duckduckgo. Truly one of the few companies
| that I root for honestly. I use you guys everyday* and I
| love y'all.
|
| It's truly a pleasure from my side as well that I could
| help Duckduckgo team, you guys have been quick in acting
| on the feedback!
|
| Most Privacy conscious user really love and appreciates
| Duckduckgo imo, myself included.
|
| I hope you guys have a nice day! Take care!
| jimminyx wrote:
| Can you please share the details with me so I can fix?
| gavriel@qwibit.ai or https://x.com/Gavriel_Cohen
| absqueued wrote:
| So did the Startpage for me! My faith is both domain being
| super new, it will resolve itself in weeks/month time.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Steve Jobs famously never allowed free meals at Apple.
|
| Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to
| things that are free; across the board - not donating to open-
| source, maxing out every dollar of food stamps, refusing to pay a
| dollar for an app if it has a free tier, even companies like AWS
| ripping off open source without any qualms. If you got an offer
| for a free relationship no strings attached, would you take it
| seriously? If someone on a street corner has artwork for $5 or
| $500, it could be the same piece of art, but which one gets more
| attention on first glance?
|
| If you want your work to be respected, do not make it open
| source. Your odds are slightly better at succeeding at acting.
| Remember that 97% of public GitHub repos have zero external
| users.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It took me a long time to realise that people value things by
| how much they pay for them, not by how much they cost to
| produce. It doesn't matter if that's software, a pair of
| trousers or a meal at a restaurant.
|
| This extends into the world of work as well. Employers that
| don't pay well tend to treat their employees poorly.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I am part of Lowendtalk community where hosting providers
| sometimes gives deals even better than hetzner/ovh etc. who
| are even impacted even more by the ram crisis but they are
| trying their best imo to not have prices be risen across the
| board. Sort of eating the 5x costs of ram.
|
| The entitlement is truly real at times. I think that
| sometimes I can be part of that entitlement too but I think I
| try to be respectful usually and say my concerns if I have
| any.
|
| This sort of becomes a circular because VPS at the very least
| do indicate support and good quality/atleast decent quality
| hardware. A server too cheap and too overprovisioned with
| steal factor (Like Contabo) is universally hated by people.
| But these are the same people who will take deals if they are
| the cheapest across the board (myself included at times, I
| have got an idle netcup vps for a few months for 10$ simply
| out of curiosity but I do think that's 10$ worth spent to get
| the idea of a public facing ipv4 but yea)
|
| So a lot of summer hosts/ deadpools (Scam-type) take on this
| opportunity and what they do is rent hardware for a month or
| year from other providers with large specs and split it into
| small chunks and give yearly, triannually, lifetime deals
| which can be too good to be true.
|
| Turns out that they are, as usually sme sort of scam type
| stuff happens after a year or two or three.
|
| This also makes it hard for new providers to try to prove
| their worth at times too if they are legit all within a
| market which is very price competitive.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I think that's backwards. If something is expensive those who
| don't value it won't pay and thus won't have. It's not that
| paying results in respect but rather a straightforward case
| of sample bias.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I don't think it was respect, as much as I respect what he did
| with Apple and tech in general. Every single story about money
| with Steve Jobs revolves around him refusing to give up any of
| it. He even scammed Steve Wozniak by lying to him how much they
| were being paid, to which Steve said he would have gladly given
| him money if he needed money. I don't think Steve needed it, he
| was like Mr. Krabs from Spongebob. Even his biological
| daughter, he refused to leave her a penny or acknowledge that
| she was his daughter, even after a court ordered DNA test
| proved she was his daughter. He paid the minimal in child
| support.
|
| For Steve Jobs it was not about respect or value, that's the
| lie. It was about greed.
| lkey wrote:
| Food stamps?? This is a ghoulish position, morally,
| financially, and as a matter of policy.
|
| We live in the richest country on planet earth and we
| _eliminated child hunger_ here during COVID only to _roll it
| back_.
|
| It's not even 1.5% of the budget currently. Compare this to our
| military adventurism budget.
|
| Every $1 invested in SNAP _generates $1.80 in economic
| activity_ , right now.
|
| Children need food to grow up and be 'productive', even if you
| don't see value in human life and are captial-maxxing; This is
| an important program for _creating excess productivity_. The
| same is true of well funded public schools. A well-fed and
| educated populous is optimal by every public metric.
|
| I doubt you are an actual member of the bourgeoisie, so I must
| conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated mass of
| parents and children you look down upon for their poor moral
| character?
|
| Adults need food to be 'productive' as well. Adults that are
| not afraid that they are going to starve commit fewer crimes.
|
| You want to 'save' some money? Eliminate means testing entirely
| and give every American have a baseline EBT card food budget
| per person in the household. No special virtuous food
| categories to make sure the poor know they are being watched.
| Just a monthly cash infusion spendable at all grocers.
|
| This way, walmart and other mega-corps won't be able to scam
| the government by creating positions that force their workers
| onto these means tested programs and lock them there.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You are arguing against a different argument than your
| parent. He implied that people using food stamps do not
| respect the effort it took to provide the food. You seem to
| be arguing whether food stamps are profitable.
|
| Your implication that people when not given free food will
| starve and that your parent commenter wants people to starve
| is clear manipulation.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > He implied that people using food stamps do not respect
| the effort it took to provide the food.
|
| People using food stamps in the US often work full-time
| jobs making insufficient living wages from highly
| profitable companies like Walmart
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-
| among-...
|
| I imagine they probably have a better inherent
| understanding of real-world food production style work
| effort than the majority of those of us who post to sites
| like HN.
| mannanj wrote:
| Seems you have good intention at heart and clearly care about
| people, and from my observation have some emotional
| processing and clearing to do to avoid sounding like you are
| lashing out at whoever internet stranger could fit your mold
| of comfort to emotionally dump on.
|
| Have you considered channeling that energy into advocacy or
| volunteerism? I feel you'd like that.
| r0p3 wrote:
| Incredible troll lol. "Have you considered volunteering?"
| In response to frustration at a massive federal initiative
| being shut down is hilarious.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Now, I'm not gonna endorse the original position, but on
| some level it's also a non-troll. Enough time spent at a
| soup kitchen will turn just about anybody into Ron Paul.
| If you want someone to have realistic opinions on social
| welfare programs based on their actual impact in reality
| and not emotion and indoctrination then putting them into
| an organization that's actually trying to maximize good
| done for their budget and/or in contact with the
| recipients is a good way to do it.
| r0p3 wrote:
| In my experience the more time I spent volunteering the
| less of a libertarian I became. Structural problems
| require structural solutions, and the market can only
| solve some of them.
|
| In any case, his reply didn't even address the main point
| and was very condescending. I respect the troll o7
| tt24 wrote:
| Not even remotely related to what the parent comment said.
| antonvs wrote:
| > I doubt you are an actual member of the bourgeoisie
|
| I wouldn't be so sure of that on HN. (Also noting you're
| using the Marxist definition rather than the default
| dictionary definition, which is "middle class".)
|
| A well-paid tech employee with a non-trivial amount of
| company stock is, strictly speaking, an "owner of the means
| of production". Even if you want to quibble with that, their
| interests are certainly well-aligned with that group - to the
| point that you generally won't hear a peep out of them as
| things get more and more dystopian, because of what Upton
| Sinclair observed, "It is difficult to get a man to
| understand something, when his salary depends on his not
| understanding it."
|
| > I must conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated
| mass of parents and children you look down upon for their
| poor moral character?
|
| It's much simpler than that. It's pure, unadulterated "I got
| mine and you ain't touchin' it". There's no real thinking
| that goes beyond that purely selfish position. The
| consequences aren't seriously considered, they're just taken
| as part of the natural order. Any causal connection is
| denied, rationalized by accusations of laziness, inferiority,
| etc.
| lkey wrote:
| You're right, it's probably just that. My mistake to read
| too deeply into someone like this.
|
| I was using Marx's definition, and I am a member of that
| class, so defined.
|
| My existing wealth and ongoing income of seven figures is
| derived almost entirely from capital accumulation.
|
| I am knowingly and actively betraying my _immediate_ class
| interest, here and elsewhere, because I 'd rather my wealth
| increase more modestly to ensure we all live in vibrant
| society.
|
| I do think it is foolish for salaried white collar workers
| not to see what is coming and begin unionization efforts;
| Their interests are ever more misaligned with capital with
| every year that passes.
| hluska wrote:
| How does missing the point and going on an unrelated rant
| help ensure we live in a vibrant society? Because I'm
| missing that part.
| lkey wrote:
| His comment implies that people who use free services
| don't value them, they are naturally disrespectful, they
| are 'ripping off' hard workers, and are 'refusing to
| pay'. These are not neutral terms, they have historically
| (since Reagan at least) conservative valence.
|
| 'welfare queens' etc...
|
| If you didn't notice this sleight of hand in the original
| comment, that means he did his work correctly.
|
| His conclusion is that things should not be free and
| open, as a rule, because they won't generate money,
| attention, or respect if they are free.
|
| He included food stamps in the middle of his list. This
| choice is not neutral.
|
| The comment invites you to reframe your understanding of
| food stamps so as to later justify its dissolution as a
| result 'human nature'.
|
| Food stamps are not intended to function like the other
| products he listed. Food stamps are not intended to
| generate respect or direct revenue.
|
| Yet, he said that someone using the 'max' monthly budget
| of $300 for food, when making less that $26000, is part
| of the 'natural disrespect' continuum. Tell me, would you
| consider $300 a month on food excessive and disrespectful
| where you live? $3.30 per meal, 3 times a day for 30.5
| days?
|
| The whole structure of his 'disrespect' argument is a lie
| to begin with. People on food stamps _do_ respect the
| value of being able to feed their families.
|
| Most Americans I've met see their need for food stamps as
| a _moral stain_. They want so badly to overcome their
| 'failure' by working even harder. Many will take second
| or third jobs with tenuous protections, and have their
| wages stolen ($2600 per person, on average, almost as
| much as food stamps pays).
|
| Either way, productivity goes up, inflation marches on,
| wages stay the same, and I'm the only one getting richer.
|
| Anywho that is why I replied in the manner I did, because
| the subtext was clearly hidden well enough for many
| people to need it pointed out.
|
| You are not immune to propaganda, doubly so for the
| propaganda you don't notice.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Free as in beer?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
|
| Its weird to be all evo psych about this either way IMO, free
| as in gratis has only been situationaly possible at all for
| very short time of human history. All armchair philosophy needs
| to take it into account! As soon as you recognize that, we're
| forced to question such pat appeals to nature or what not, and
| drawn necessarily to consider how systems make humans one way
| or another.
|
| Put another way, this position is incredibly fatalistic, as
| well as kinda sad and lonely to my ears.
| rapnie wrote:
| The parent comment is downvoted into oblivion, but I read it as
| not necessarily saying "this is the way to do it" but rather
| "this is the harsh reality of rampant capitalist society" that
| we built around ourselves (we all carry responsibility here),
| where only money speaks and people "respect" full wallets
| coughing up the dough. I spent most my time in FOSS realms the
| past decade, and many people who are even participants in free
| software development themself often do not notice where and how
| value is extracted, and how they indirectly or directly play a
| role in that.
|
| As for value extraction, have a look at this article and weep:
| https://www.heise.de/en/news/Harvard-study-Open-source-has-a...
|
| OTOH this also shows the huge potential FOSS has, if it manages
| to only slightly shift that balance in their favor.
| beej71 wrote:
| Oh shit... Ok... Um... Beej's Guide to Network Programming is
| now $500! Respect me!
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Oh! Thank you mighty capitalist god! Now I appreciate the
| value add you bring this world! I was blind before, but now I
| see!
| Boxxed wrote:
| Pretty much matches my experience. Trying to sell something on
| Craig's list or whatever is pretty hit-or-miss, whether it's $5
| or $500. But make it free, and people will bang down your door
| to try to get it. It could be a shoebox full of used soy sauce
| packets and you'll get people for days asking if it's still
| available.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to
| things that are free_
|
| I know a few people who had to make use of food banks and were
| _grateful at the time_ for the donations of others. They now
| try to donate what they can as payback.
| antonvs wrote:
| > Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to
| things that are free
|
| Citation needed. You're describing a particular tendency, not
| some absolute property of human psychology. It's also a
| behavior that's greatly affected by social construction. In the
| US, the attitude you're describing is much more prevalent than
| in some other countries, because of cultural biases.
| qingcharles wrote:
| At one startup there was unlimited free candy bars. We (devs)
| had to have a meeting with the office manager and tell them to
| remove them. We had zero self control.
| lucasluitjes wrote:
| I've been annoyed with Google search quality lately and was
| wondering how the others fared on this specific issue. Turns out,
| mostly not much better.
|
| Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Brave all had the github repo
| and nanoclaw.net (the fake homepage) in the first or second
| place. Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only
| tangentially related Nanoclaw results, not the github repo or
| either the fake or real homepage.
|
| Mojeek was the exception, sort of. It had some random news sites
| up top, but the github repo in 2nd place and nanoclaw.dev (the
| real homepage) in the 4th place. The fake nanoclaw.net did not
| show.
|
| Kagi is the only one I couldn't try because apparently I used up
| my free credits a year back. Can anyone see how they compare?
| troymc wrote:
| For me in Canada today, Kagi is showing nanoclaw.wrongtld as
| the third text link, after two different GitHub repos (why two?
| I didn't have time to sort that out). I clicked the thing to
| block the link to the site with the wrong TLD; hopefully other
| Kagi subscribers will do the same.
| vogu66 wrote:
| My default is ecosia and below sponsored links there is only
| the github and pages talking about the thing, no official or
| unofficial page. I guess that's better?
|
| It gives two sponsored links to openclaw things, so no fake
| either (presumably, I don't know what they are).
| bakugo wrote:
| > I don't want to be playing this game. I want to be writing code
|
| I assume the "I" here refers to Claude, who seemingly wrote the
| entire project AND the linked post.
| elevation wrote:
| This project was launched very quickly, and may have not had a
| large budget for extra domains.
|
| But for entities with a bit more time, you can prevent this
| scenario by taking acquiring the .com/.net variant domains before
| launching.
| Growtika wrote:
| A couple years back John Reilly posted on HN "How I ruined my
| SEO" and I helped him fix it for free. He wrote about the whole
| thing here: https://johnnyreilly.com/how-we-fixed-my-seo
|
| Happy to do the same for you if you want.
|
| The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net
| site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every
| publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but
| linked to a fake site, here's the real one." You'd be surprised
| how many will actually swap the link. That alone could flip
| things.
|
| Beyond that there's some technical SEO stuff on nanoclaw.dev that
| would help - structured data, schema, signals for search engines
| and LLMs. Happy to walk you through it.
|
| update: ok this is getting more traction than I expected so let
| me give some practical stuff.
|
| 1. Google Search Console - did you add and verify nanoclaw.dev
| there? If not, do it now and submit your sitemap. Basic but
| critical.
|
| 2. I checked the fake site and it actually doesn't have that many
| backlinks, so the situation is more winnable than it looks.
|
| 3. Your GitHub repo has tons of high quality backlinks which is
| great. Outreach to those places, tell the story. I'm sure a few
| will add a link to your actual site. That alone makes you way
| more resilient to fakers going forward. This is only happening
| because everything is so new. Here's a list with all the
| backlinks pointing to your repo:
|
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bBrYsppQuVrktL1lPfNm...
|
| 4. Open social profiles for the project - Twitter/X, LinkedIn
| page if you want. This helps search engines build a knowledge
| graph around NanoClaw. Then add Organization and sameAs schema
| markup to nanoclaw.dev connecting all the dots (your site, the
| GitHub repo, the social profiles). This is how you tell Google
| "these all belong to the same entity."
|
| 5. One more thing - you had a chance to link to nanoclaw.dev from
| this HN thread but you linked to your tweet instead. Totally get
| it, but a strong link from a front page HN post with all this
| traffic and engagement would do real work for your site's
| authority. If it's not crossing any rule (specific use case here
| so maybe check with the mods haha) drop a comment here with a
| link to nanoclaw.dev. I don't think anyone here would mind if it
| will get you few steps closer towards winning that fake site
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| This is very generous of you!
|
| If I was the author, however, I'd still feel like I've been put
| in a predicament where I need to spend personal agency to fix
| something that Google has broken.
|
| While that may just be a fact of life, my internal injustice-o-
| meter would be raging. Like, Google is going to take hours of
| _my life_ because they, with all their billions of capital, can
| 't figure out the canonically-true website when it's RIGHT
| THERE in the GitHub repository?
|
| Ugh. I guess that's just the day we live in. But it makes me
| rage against the machine on the author's behalf.
| sam1r wrote:
| I can't be the only one blasting killing in the name of in my
| noise canceling headphones the moment I read your comment..
| input_sh wrote:
| > This is very generous of you!
|
| No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally ignores
| some of the things pointed out in the article. The author
| _has_ invested time into proper SEO optimization, legit
| websites _already_ link to it et cetera, it 's all explained
| in the article.
|
| From the perspective of a spammer: They need like 2 million
| MAU to earn below minimum wage. You're never getting those
| figures by doing something legit and actually useful to a
| tiny subset of people. You either need a vague site beyond
| any point of usefulness to anyone or you need a network of
| knockoff sites. The reason you can't compete with these
| shitty SEO spam version of your site is because they
| _already_ have a network of "authoritative" (in Google's
| eyes) sites and all they have to do is to link from them to a
| new one to expand their shitty network.
|
| From the perspective of SEO agencies: They can't guarantee
| results. They can tell you vague, easily-googleable best
| practices and give you an output of some SEO SaaS that's far
| too expensive for an individual to purchase. Ahrefs(.com) is
| the prime example of this, the cheapest paid version costs
| $129/month. Do you care about SEO _that much_? No, so you go
| to these agencies and give them money for _them_ to give you
| the output of such a tool. But that SaaS _also_ only contains
| vague and nebulous "things to fix" to follow "best
| practices" because they _also_ cannot know what drives
| traffic to your competitor from the outside perspective.
|
| My best suggestion would be to start a website from day one.
| Doesn't matter how good the website is at first, Google
| favours sites that exist for longer. If you're creating a
| website _after_ the knock-off version already exist, you
| might as well give up immediately, it 's gonna be near
| impossible to recover from that.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| > No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally
| ignores some of the things pointed out in the article.
|
| Sales pitch or not, someone offering their time to help me
| with a problem is feels generous to me. To each their own,
| I suppose.
|
| But again, you reinforce my point in your last sentence.
| Now anytime I want to make any little toy project (because
| how can anyone know when their toy project will blow up
| overnight?) I have to make a full blown website just to
| ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?
|
| My point still stands. Google is the problem and while we
| likely can't effectively do anything about it, it's
| frustrating as hell.
| input_sh wrote:
| I never said Google isn't the problem, what I said is
| that going to an agency isn't gonna fix that problem any
| more than running a SaaS tool yourself will, because
| they're not Google and they have no insight into what
| Google made one website prioritised over the other.
| Because, as you've pointed out, Google _is_ the problem.
|
| > I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I
| don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?
|
| No, I said a crappy one on purpose. How good is it
| doesn't matter, the sooner the Google knows about the
| domain, the better. Might as well be a copy of your
| README file using one of the million SSGs GitHub supports
| that will turn that README file into a website. The
| _only_ thing that matters is that the website exists and
| that Google knows about it before the other one.
|
| That's why many people purchase the domain on day 1
| before they even start building the thing and also why
| many have like a dozen domains in their account that is
| like a boulevard of broken dreams there to remind them
| once a year they haven't done anything with them.
|
| Still cheaper than a SEO agency or in most cases even one
| month of ahrefs access.
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| I had the exact same thought while reading the above comment,
| as helpful and generous as it is. Google's entire business
| model is to help people find things on the internet. They're
| an insanely well resourced company with all kinds of smart
| programmers. They have a moral and financial incentive to
| direct people to canonical sources of information. And STILL
| it's on this open-source dev to do all the steps outlined
| just to get the situation corrected?
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Google's business model is to help Google's customers pay
| money to Google. Google Search's customers are mostly
| scammers who run adverts. Helping the user find a thing is
| at odds with helping the user find a scam that pays Google
| money.
| nickff wrote:
| This is somewhat true; despite what HNers seem to think,
| online ads are not very effective (in terms of convincing
| people to buy things), and Google 'screws over' its
| advertising customers as often as it delivers deficient
| search results to users.
| gowld wrote:
| How many Google search results would point to OP's site?
|
| If Google didn't exist, how many Google search results would
| point to OP's site?
| allthetime wrote:
| The billions of capital are exactly why they don't care about
| you. Also, Google didn't break anything. The only person who
| can claw out a place in this giant machine for yourself is
| you - all while billions of others attempt to do the same.
| vegasbrianc wrote:
| great feedback!
| graeme wrote:
| Fantastic advice
| RyanOD wrote:
| Lame to have to do all this pointless busy work just to "win"
| the SEO battle.
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| People forget that Google is a malware services company. A
| significant part of their revenue is fake OBS malware and the
| like.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Another comment here but here are all the search engines I looked
| at:
|
| 1. DDG 2. Kagi 3. Brave 4. Ecosia 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia 7.
| Mojeek 8. Yandex.ru
|
| from 1-5 all referenced .net before .dev and DDG referenced .net
| before github , marinalia didn't give me either .net, .dev or gh
| link but rather docker.com or some other tech articles
|
| Mojeek and Yandex.ru DID give me .dev links before .net at the
| time of writing.
|
| I literally opened these two as a joke especially Mojeek not
| expecting too much But I just know names of lots of search
| engines so I tried.
|
| Mojeek and Yandex.ru have surprised me although I think yandex.ru
| might have referenced the .dev because of
| https://nanoclaw.dev/ru/ as it points to this.
|
| Mojeek seems interesting now from this observation
|
| I also wanted to try swisscows but looks like they have become
| 100% premium as I do remember being able to search for free but
| now a popup comes.
|
| I also tried baidu (chinese search engine) and it gave results in
| chinese and firefox translate sort of stuttered and didn't work
| when I tried to translate, I don't know chinese so pasted it in
| claude and it doesn't link to either .net or .dev but rather
| chinese links.
|
| Now with all of this observation, I think that we do know one
| Provider (Mojeek) who won. A lot of these on these lists are
| actually not independent except Mojeek and brave and probably
| yandex.ru
|
| SO I guess the main takeaway from this could be that Independent
| search engines can be interesting. They can still be hit or miss
| but the more independent search engines the merrier given that
| some might miss but some will also hit.
|
| My comment definitely feels like a good reputation bonus for
| mojeek. Well anything for more independent search engines imo. I
| looked at their about me and it seems that they are a single
| person (Marc Smith). Fascinating stuff
|
| I know marginalia_nu is on hn so maybe marginalia and mojeek can
| share some index together. Anyways this was a fun exciting
| experiment to do. I hope the community tries out other search
| engines if I may have missed any and share insights if a
| particular search engine gives interesting results.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I think you put more effort into this comment than the entire
| OP, which was clearly written by Claude.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Now that does say something about the world, doesn't it?
|
| I think this had just made me curious so yeah haha
|
| I mean one thing I am not understanding is why they would
| write an article with AI tho. They still prompted AI, might
| as well give us what they prompted or just write under <300
| words or less. I mean its literally twitter (refuse to call
| it X)
|
| Or like make a 2 minute video with screenshare just talking
| to the camera about it like they might've with claude
| perhaps.
|
| They also have discord, They could have literally given a
| free contributor to help write the article from such video or
| concerns and credit them properly. I mean, heck I could've
| written the article for free for just a credit at this point
| where I got so invested haha.
|
| I genuinely don't understand why you would prompt an
| article/text out of all things with AI. I hope I never get
| persuaded with this dark side lol.
| roywiggins wrote:
| My guesses in no particular order:
|
| 1) this style genuinely is preferred by lots of people on
| X/Twitter so you might as well lean into it
|
| 2) People who spend a lot of time with LLMs think this sort
| of writing is normal or even standard just through
| overexposure, a sort of pseudo social proof
|
| 2b) People who spend a lot of time with other people who
| use LLMs think this is how humans write (actual social
| proof)
|
| 3) People are insecure about their writing ability and find
| the non-judgmental non-human LLM editor soothing
|
| 4) people are lazy
|
| 5) people aren't lazy per se but they know writing has been
| so devalued that they aren't going to spend time on it that
| they don't need to
|
| 6) their first experience of writing was trying to hit word
| count requirements in grade school and that stuck
|
| 7) Visibly using LLMs is becoming a shibboleth for a social
| group on Twitter and LinkedIn. It's a marker that you are
| dogfooding the crappy AI tools you're developing and
| selling. Under this theory, being visibly LLM output is
| actually intentional: "look ma, no hands- all NanoClaw!"
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > 3) People are insecure about their writing ability and
| find the non-judgmental non-human LLM editor soothing
|
| My writing style gets criticized. a lot (I think its from
| people who have good hearts who just want to point out
| some flaws and I appreciate that). So I will admit that I
| understand this point because if someone questions your
| writing style, you do get insecure and sometimes I did
| have thoughts of leaving hackernews because of it,
| because I mean I always took pride in all of my comments,
| they are mine after all :)
|
| I don't think you can ever fix that, All AI does is
| remove that critique from you to LLM but I'd say that the
| largest reason people might do it is because its hard to
| respond to such criticism (IMO).
|
| If suppose someone says your writing is bad. To me, it
| takes a huge mental effort to not be angry at the
| decision and type something. It takes me time to reflect
| and try to respond to them peacefully.
|
| I think I am only able to do that because I imagine this
| as a person who has business and I imagine how I would
| want an ideal business or a person who has business would
| want to reply and how it would look on the business. I
| have witnessed some businesses who are absolutely top
| notch but their responses/nature in forums sometimes is
| very off-putting. I'd rather try to do opposite.
|
| And to me, its those particular comments that I write
| that I cherish the most. I had once written a comment
| which felt so good to me personally from a criticism that
| I seriously wondered how I wrote that. For a few days, I
| can't say for sure but I remember just looking up at that
| comment whenever I felt bad.
|
| The one thing I agree is that it can be very time
| consuming tho to respond to such criticism.
|
| I mean, I try to respond to these comments nicely but
| that doesn't mean I am not insecure about my writing. I
| do think that I may project that if I write a nice
| comment but yeah, I believe everyone can be insecure
| about writing to some degree. And chances are that most
| people are more likely to create a ruckus of the
| situation than handle it well.
|
| So I think from all of this, if I had to summarize it,
| I'd like it if people could share their concerns but in a
| way which is agreeable. If you don't like someone's
| writing, try to point it out in a way of
| feedback/cooperation that the other person I can agree
| in.
|
| If you do want to point out someone's writing, try to
| imagine yourself being in their situation and try to
| anticipate what message might be the most
| beneficial/(cooperative?) in that sense. Just imagine
| yourself in their shoes basically.
|
| So I do agree with you on this point. Perhaps point 5) as
| well because this comment took me 40 mins to write and
| think.
|
| It's also how time is invested, like people rather use
| their 40 mins to create a project which can reach x stars
| on github and that will have some definite measure.
| Whereas this comment got no measure in like, the value
| right now but I like to think that given enough long
| time, if I ever create anything. These comments could be
| meaningful in that regards to show what I think maybe.
|
| Another part is that I can't stand obnoxious
| reddit/twitter. Those algorithms feel flawed to me and
| I'd rather not contribute to that machine and the funny
| thing is that the above line of thinking might be more
| beneficial in those platforms than here given that they
| are mainstream but yeah.
|
| More than anything, I just write because I find these
| topics interesting to type about or that, I write for
| myself, I wish to read these comments I type in future to
| really see what I was thinking about stuff. Kinda like a
| journal and twitter/reddit platforms are less intended
| for such long comments than HN and tbh HN can have its
| limits too but I think the community overall is much more
| receptive of long comments.
|
| (Imagine if I wrote you such a long post on a random
| subreddit or in twitter, those platforms are less likely
| to capture nuance imo)
|
| Edit: were these the best 40 minutes I have spent,
| probably not, that was playing skribble with my friend
| yesterday but like I did get a comment permanently about
| a particular topic I can reference anywhere in a
| discussion and it was interesting to think about it. But
| if a person doesn't care about it or the community
| doesn't do backlash about AI writing and those were your
| points. So yeah I do agree with you more and more
| thinking about it honestly.
|
| To some people, it could be an interesting tradeoff to
| spend less time thinking or writing but I mean, that
| doesn't feel right to me, especially if you are
| passionate about something I guess.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| - I think I was upset when Google allowed fake ad for VLC to
| appear high in ranking
|
| - I hate that Google returns content farms instead of product web
| pages
|
| - I hate that Google provides a page of 10 useful links, later
| links are just pure garbage. I think that something in Google
| engine is profoundly broken
|
| - I maintain my own search index, but it requires a lot of
| effort, and attention. I do insert links if I find them worthy. I
| think more people should have their personal search indexes. Mine
| is below. I am quite happy that problems like these do not affect
| me that much
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > I think that something in Google engine is profoundly broken
|
| Optimizing for ad revenue is a good start.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| > The person running nanoclaw[.]net can put anything they want on
| that page tomorrow. A crypto scam. A phishing page. Malicious
| download links. They could fork the GitHub repo, inject malicious
| code, and link to it from the site that Google is telling
| thousands of people is legitimate.
|
| A lot of handwringing about hypotheticals. The page is up there
| _because_ it links the official repo. Changing that will quickly
| tank its search rank.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| This _is_ a google problem, but only secondary.
|
| The crux of the matter is that there's nothing that protects an
| open project besides reputation, and nowadays in the digital
| space it can be cheaply farmed.
|
| Laws could help, but they only work when you undertake purposeful
| actions to be covered by them, like register a trademark, and
| it's never cheap.
|
| Imagine you're in a local band playing shows. It's 3 month old
| and you have no issued records. A second band tighter with venues
| takes your name and starts performing under your moniker. You
| have no money to take that to court and good luck making a case.
| You can't do anything besides screaming on the web or, don't
| know, kicking a few butts. You change your name.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| You can trademark your open source project, but only the
| biggest projects do.
|
| You used to be able to buy yourname .com, .net, .org and that
| was a de facto trademark. Now there are gTLDs you can't.
| networkcat wrote:
| Before installing new software, I usually visit its GitHub page
| or Wikipedia entry first and click through to the official site
| from there. I just don't trust the 'official' sites that pop up
| in Google search results. How many of you do the same?
| fritzo wrote:
| Don't forget the SourceForge rug pull, when the once definitive
| central source of truth was bought out and became a venue for
| malware
| csomar wrote:
| It's worse. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago [1]. With AI
| responses and Google pulling results from different sources, you
| could potentially hijack other brands with your own fake content
| (ie: phone number).
|
| 1: https://codeinput.com/blog/google-seo
| signorovitch wrote:
| > This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem.
|
| I've tested on a few of the big search engines, and nanoclaw.dev
| is never in the first page.
|
| Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research Mode."
| The only way I was able to get a direct link to nanoclaw.dev was
| with chatgpt, which found it by scraping the GitHub (it also spat
| out links to a couple of other copies it found from google.)
|
| Seems this _is_ a wider SEO issue, one which infiltrates even the
| technology supposed to replace it.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research
| Mode."
|
| Unsurprisingly, right? Gemini just uses the same back end as
| Google itself, which - according to OP - doesn't list his site
| on page 1, not page 2 and not page 5.
|
| Depending on the prompt, it should have gotten the link from
| the github, but that's like an indirect hint from a secondary
| source, it probably ranks the Google index quite highly when it
| does research.
| alexpham14 wrote:
| Oof, this is exactly the nightmare scenario for "repo-first" OSS.
|
| The weird bit isn't that a scraper site exists, it's that Google
| can't do the obvious graph join: query == project name, #1 result
| is the repo, repo declares Homepage = X, yet Google still boosts
| an imposter domain. That's not "SEO", that's the ranking system
| refusing to treat maintainer-declared canonical as a strong
| signal. Early domain squatters get to "set the default" purely by
| being first, then they can flip the content later once trust is
| baked in.
|
| People keep saying "tell users to bookmark the real URL" like
| that scales. Most people will click the second link and assume
| it's official. If Google can't solve this class of problem, their
| "AI answers" are going to be a bigger mess than blue links ever
| were.
| MarkSweep wrote:
| The link on GitHub to the real site is marked with
| rel="nofollow". I wonder if it would make sense for GitHub to
| remove nofollow in some circumstances. Perhaps based on some sort
| of reputation system or if the site links back to the repo with a
| <link rel="self" href="..." /> in the header? Presumably that
| would help the real site rank higher when the repo ranks highly.
| geocar wrote:
| I don't see any reason that GitHub should use rel="nofollow"
|
| Github only has authority because people put their shit there;
| if people want to point that back at the "right" website,
| Github should be helping facilitate that, instead of trying to
| help Google make their dogshit search index any better.
|
| I mean, seriously, doesn't Bing own Github anyway?
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Perverse incentives strike again! Websites that allow links
| in user-generated content are spammed with user-generated
| spam links to improve SEO of spam sites, which hurts the
| site's own reputation because most of the links on it are
| spam. To avoid this, all sites use nofollow.
| Sweepi wrote:
| > When you Google "NanoClaw," a fake website ranks #2 globally,
| right below the project's GitHub.
|
| Unfortunately, the fake website [.net] is also #3 on Kagi, and #1
| on Duckduckgo. On Kagi, the Github is #1 and nanoclaw.dev is #4,
| but only if you count "Interesting Finds". On Duckduckgo, the
| Github is #2 and nanoclaw.dev is nowhere to be found.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Is there an acronym for "AI generated, didn't read"?
| roywiggins wrote:
| https://indieweb.org/ai;dr
| newswasboring wrote:
| I fell for this yesterday, but for zeroclaw not nanoclaw. I found
| this website[1] through brave search I think. I was not paying
| too much attention as I was under the influence, it points to the
| wrong repo[2] and instructions install from that. I didn't like
| zeroclaw anyways so I tried to uninstall it and only then
| realized i'm on a forked repo.
|
| [1] https://zeroclaw.net/ [2]
| https://github.com/openagen/zeroclaw
| vegasbrianc wrote:
| SEO is broken at the moment. With Google Overviews just killing
| organic SEO, it is becoming less and less relevant,
| unfortunately.
| youknownothing wrote:
| > I've done everything you're supposed to do and more.
|
| By the sound of it, everything except reporting it? Winning SEO
| just means appear before them in search results, but the fake
| page shouldn't just lose the race, it should be taken down.
|
| ICANN specifies how to deal with this kind of issue:
| https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/submitting-dns-a...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Comparing the two sites side-by-side (nanoclaw.net, the fake,
| and nanoclaw.dev, the correct one), there's also the issue that
| nanoclaw.net is doing a better job of looking like a correct
| website.
|
| The fake site:
|
| - includes a copyright statement
|
| - includes a bottom sitemap
|
| - includes an "author" meta-tag
|
| - includes a sameAs to discord "nanoclaw", where the real site
| references some random string discord server
|
| - has a .net instead of a .dev
|
| Given all that plus the PageRank feedback loop of the .net
| having been up longer and enough people having found what
| they're looking for from it to not trigger Google's low-quality
| signals, author is fighting an uphill battle here; the
| squatters know what they're doing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I don't want to be playing this game. I want to be writing
| code, building community, pushing features, fixing bugs.
|
| Then just write code, build features, and fix bugs. Nobody is
| forcing you to fix search engines' problems. If you're not making
| money off of traffic, then why worry so much about SEO? Just do
| your thing. If it really bothers you, put a little note on your
| GitHub warning people about the fake site, and get on with your
| life.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| You think somebody who wrote "nanoclaw" really doesn't care
| about getting industry famous and improving their career
| prospects?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That information comes from the GitHub commit history, not
| the existence / nonexistence / relative popularity of a
| website. If that's the goal, the imitating website is only
| helping the career prospects so long as it doesn't do
| anything shady on pass-through.
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| I did some experimenting using different search engines and AIs.
| Here's the results:
|
| Google and Brave linked to the official GitHub repo followed by
| the fake domain. DuckDuckGo and Bing linked to the fake domain
| first, followed by the official GitHub. Mojeek gave higher
| ranking to two third party articles, but linked to both the
| official GitHub and website without fakes. Qwant was the worst,
| as the official website was the second result amongst multiple
| fake websites and an unrelated GitHub repo.
|
| Then there the AIs. ChatGPT, Google AI mode, Gemini, Grok,
| Perplexity, and Brave Search "Ask" all linked to the official
| website, and some added the GitHub repo as well. DuckDuckGo
| Search Assist linked to just the official GitHub. Google AI mode,
| Gemini and Grok also explicitly warned about the fake websites.
| Copilot got the official website and GitHub right, but linked to
| a presumably fake X account as well.
|
| Conclusion: Google, Brave and Mojeek win in search. AI is very
| good and clearly beats search overall. Google AI mode, Gemini and
| Grok stand out in quality.
| 1kurac wrote:
| I tried AltPower Search and it exhibits the same issue as
| Google. I think you might just need to give it more time to
| index. Nanoclaw.dev has only been available for a week. Then,
| it's the lower relative reputation of the 'dev' vs. the 'net'
| domain ...
|
| [1]: https://altpower.app [2]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://nanoclaw...
| [3]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds
| sghitbyabazooka wrote:
| this thing is just google with a theme
| spyder wrote:
| For you... But the results are different for different users.
|
| For me Google shows the .net site first the github one as
| second.
|
| Asking chatgpt 5.2 (Auto mode) to search for the nanoclaw site,
| it says the same, first links the .net site and shows the
| github as an optional page. When I try to give it a hint by
| asking "are you sure?" it still even hallucinates that it's
| linked from the github:
|
| _" Yes -- nanoclaw.net is the official documentation/site for
| the NanoClaw project, in the sense that it's the project's
| published homepage and is directly linked from its canonical
| open-source repository. It describes the project, features,
| installation steps, and links to the source code on GitHub,
| which is the authoritative source for the project's codebase."_
|
| Chatgpt 5.2 (Thinking mode) and Claude gets it right the first
| try, they asnwer with the official .dev page first and claude
| shows the .net second as "another site covering the project".
| tmaly wrote:
| Wasn't one of the original ideas of NFT was to essentially
| identify the original creator?
| keybored wrote:
| Live by bots, die by bots.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Do what Louis Rossman did... just ask Google's AI what you need
| to change on your site... Apparently that's the secret now.
| theanonymousone wrote:
| I saw this some time ago with Bing and OpenCode:
|
| "If I search for "opencode GitHub" in Bing, a random fork is
| returned"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573286
| jccooper wrote:
| I don't see that Google cares much about backlinks any more.
| Seems like it's all about "content" keywords and maybe a little
| time-on-site. The domain is a huge signal, which is probably
| where the problem comes from here.
|
| Sadly, Google's generally better against all the new AI-generated
| content farms than other players, so maybe they're still running
| PageRank somewhere.
| Drupon wrote:
| Sorry Gavriel Cohen, but this Google search placement was
| promised to the other person thousands of years ago.
| rocketvole wrote:
| i think orcasclicer suffers from the same issue. Not really sure
| why some oss projects struggle with this issue and others don't
| (notepad++)
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Google is absolutely idiotic sometimes.
|
| We (as in the team that helped fork and migrate the PoE1 wiki)
| setup a new domain for the Path of Exile 2 wiki, which is being
| hosted by the folks at Grinding Gear Games and linked on the
| official website and in multiple places on the highly trafficked
| subreddit.
|
| Despite this, Google has decided that the site is not relevant
| and shouldn't appear anywhere in search results, despite the wiki
| for the first game appearing everywhere.
| allthetime wrote:
| Piggybacking on the _Claw_ hype, surprised when someone
| piggybacks on you...
| ajross wrote:
| That was exactly my first thought. The better framing here
| isn't "honest site victimized by Google linking to their IP-
| thieving scammer clone", it's "dude lost in an arms race of
| eyeball chasing and is salty about it".
| stusmall wrote:
| Especially when the original claw had to change its name
| because it was piggybacking on another products hype...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| And I'm losing the sanity battle for my own mind with all these
| AI generated posts pls I beg you two lines by your hand are worth
| 100000 generated tokens
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Two weeks? Hardly enough for the correct url to take over. A
| correct url with no history/presence that came out of nowhere as
| far as the engine is concerned. It will happen most likely tho,
| thanks to the links from the project etc, but might take a bit of
| time since the other url is established. "losing the battle" now
| perhaps, but not for long most likely.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I've noticed this a few years ago. Google has been ruining its
| search engine deliberately so. I could explain the things Google
| did here, but other websites and videos already explain it,
| including the why (though there is some speculation as to why).
|
| These days I even find e. g. qwant sometimes having better
| results than google search. I see it as a positive thing though -
| I can soon stop using Google search. So one less Google product.
| One day I will be Google free. It will be a happy day. I really
| think Google must cease to exist.
|
| (The only sad thing is how crap the other search engines are. So
| while Google search sucks nowadays, I consistently get even worse
| results with e. g. DuckDuckGo. And I think part of the reason is
| because the world wide web also sucks a LOT more compared to the
| old days. Google is also partially responsible for this by the
| way, which just reinforces the idea that Google must die.)
| inkysigma wrote:
| Just an FYI, but I don't know if being in the website field of
| GitHub really helps since there's a rel nofollow on the link.
| imp0cat wrote:
| It's simple really, .net > .dev.
| czhu12 wrote:
| I've been developing and maintaining https://canine.sh and
| https://hellocsv.github.io/HelloCSV/ for some time now, and its
| really odd what pops up when you google these.
|
| Neither of these projects anything requiring payment anywhere,
| but tons of sites pop up trying to "sell" these projects. I
| wouldn't even know what that means and I'm kind of tempted to
| drop in a credit card to see what happens. Would they auto send
| you a link to the public repo?
|
| Most of it is quite lazy and haven't quite kept up with modern AI
| capabilities. They mostly just scrape the text I wrote, and
| present it with some screenshots that I created. I can imagine a
| future where
|
| - really nice landing pages are generated
|
| - the product is entirely rebranded
|
| - marketing is automated (linkedin, google ads, etc)
|
| and someone can develop some autonomous system that basically
| finds high quality, yet unknown open source projects, and
| redeploys it and sells it online for actual money.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Gavriel is freaking out over nothing while making rookie mistakes
| pretending not to be in an SEO war
|
| It's literally not his problem that some people click a scam
| link, he still has 18,000 github stars, its just a bifurcated
| audience of undiscerning people
|
| He's overly worried about a perfect unanimous impression when he
| shouldn't
|
| Now he's wasting his money on SEO tweaks and domain names while
| saying he only wants to code, then focus on coding! not buying
| obscure TLD's and vibecoding sitemaps while wondering what he did
| wrong
|
| yeesh, some people can't handle a little fame
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| What a terrible take. OP spent a lot of time making his
| project, and now someone else is impersonating them and
| trashing their reputation with ads. Of course they have reason
| to be upset.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| being upset is a feeling, panic buying domains is an action
| jackfranklyn wrote:
| The structured data point in the top comment is spot on. Added
| Organization and SoftwareApplication schema to my own project
| recently and the shift in how Google indexes you is real - went
| from being treated as a random domain to Google actually
| understanding what the site represents.
|
| What's maddening about this whole situation though is that Google
| already has every signal it needs. The GitHub repo links to
| nanoclaw.dev. The npm package links to it. The commit history
| proves authorship. But apparently domain age and raw backlink
| count still trump verified ownership signals. The system rewards
| whoever stakes out the domain first, not whoever actually built
| the thing.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I was actually excited reading this comment because I thought
| it might have some information useful to my site's SEO and then
| I realized it was written by an LLM. Can anyone confirm what
| it's saying?
| rikem wrote:
| You can read more about how Google processes Organisation
| schema and others such as LocalBusiness here https://develope
| rs.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
| hluska wrote:
| I'm not the person you're replying to but I'm familiar with
| what they're talking about. Fair warning, while I've
| experimented with this, I wouldn't endorse them as strongly
| as the commenter and don't think I'd use a phrase like 'the
| shift is real' (unless I was trying to annoy my child).
|
| If I were you, I would start with some documentation:
|
| https://schema.org/docs/gs.html
|
| https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication
|
| https://schema.org/Organization
|
| The first link will get you started - it will explain what
| the commenter was talking about in detail. The second and
| third links will give you more information on those specific
| types.
|
| Good luck with your site!
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| A guy that stole someone else's idea by making a shinier website
| getting mad that someone stole his idea by making a shinier
| website. Such is life.
| shubhamintech wrote:
| lol This gets worse with AI search. If Google can't figure out
| canonical source from a GitHub repo linking directly to the
| official site, LLMs definitely can't. And once an AI overview
| bakes the fake site into its knowledge graph, you're not just
| losing Google rankings imo, you're losing the models too.
| Registering every TLD on day 1 is now just table stakes for any
| OSS project which still doesn't seem fair.
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