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by m-i-l·2y ago·view on hn ↗
Same here - most of my personal site has been stuck in Google's "Discovered - currently not indexed" limbo for nearly 2 years, despite regularly submitting pages for indexing, and doing all the usual things like optimising Lighthouse score and so on. I went on the Google Search support forums and it was quite sad - just vast numbers of people crying into the void. It is almost like Google have given up on search.

If they actually wanted to improve it, the key would be to move away from the advertising funded model - as Larry Page and Sergey Brin warned in 1998 "advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"[0]. Personally I think they could at least pay running costs with a paid support model - it might not earn as much money as advertising, but as a gateway to the internet and other Google services it could still be very valuable to both Google and their users.

[0] "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Computer Networks, vol. 30 (1998), pp. 107-117, (noting that the quote is in Appendix A which seems to be missing from some more recent online versions).

1 comments
40 years ago news organizations (news papers, radio, and TV) had strict policies that the ad department (which was always in house - never outsourced to doubleclick/google) was not allowed to talk to the news department. You bought an ad because you wanted to reach people who wanted news from orginizations would "bite the hand that fed them". Internet ads don't seem to have that. They could, the culture existed before in other forms and wouldn't be hard.