Ask HN: Should Google remove medium.com from search results?

37 points by Elect2 5 years ago | 38 comments

Medium articles have a very high priority on Google search results. But almost all articles from medium.com are showing an "upgrade" button and if you do not buy their membership you can not continue reading.

tt433 5 years ago |

Personally I loathe seeing Pinterest come up in my Google searches. So I use a "custom" search in chrome that just sticks "-inurl:pinterest" after all my searches. Perhaps that may be an option for you.

7373737373 5 years ago | |

Yes, all these bullshit sites, where right click and saving images, videos etc. doesn't work, because they want to monopolize the actual media content, fuck them.

mrjivraj 5 years ago | |

why do you dislike pinterest results?

ngokevin 5 years ago | | |

They're always already links to somewhere else, and behind login wall.

antoineMoPa 5 years ago | | |

Because most pictures are reposts which distracts you from the actual image source you are looking for (Sometimes you want the original text that was next to the picture).

Also, since there are a lot of other pictures with titles in pinterest pages, the probability to match all keywords in your search is high even if the relevance of the main picture is low.

tt433 5 years ago | | |

I want to know the origin of whatever content I am consuming. Pinterest appears to deliberately obfuscate that information.

andrei_says_ 5 years ago | | |

Because I cannot access the content. So the very existence of the result is bait and switch.

fiftyacorn 5 years ago | |

It's a shame there isn't a -paywall option

jjeaff 5 years ago |

I think a more broad question could be, since when does google allow sites to show different content to the Google bot than what they show to regular visitors.

That used to be a common black hat seo technique.

TenJack 5 years ago |

They should remove Pinterest results first.

DarthGhandi 5 years ago | |

I'd put quora in there too, why is all this walled content at the top of google constantly? It's not even high quality.

drusepth 5 years ago | | |

Quick tip for Quora: you can append ?share=1 to get around signup walls.

varbhat 5 years ago |

Google's results is becoming worse with lot of low quality sites appearing in the search results. I think that they must improve the search engine to show quality results.

What i also want is filter in Google Search Engine to remove all those junk results.

ethanwillis 5 years ago |

Google needs to do a lot more to improve the top search results. It was a shock just a few days ago when I told my younger sister to Google something and then I had to tell her "no... scroll down about 2/3rds of the page" because everything above the fold was ads and junk sites.

I have to now not only apply the wadsworth constant to youtube videos but also to search results.

oefnak 5 years ago | |

Well, if you're on this site you must have heard something about adblockers? That's the first halve of your problem fixed.

ethanwillis 5 years ago | | |

Well, my moral conundrum is that I am fine with ads and I don't want to block them wholesale. I just only want to block bad actors.

Now in this specific case we were using a computer that had been freshly wiped, so nothing like an adblocker had been setup yet. (I use brave on my main work computer)

BlackiceNetwork 5 years ago |

Interesting - i’ve read a lot of medium articles over the years on a daily basis, and not once it ever gave me an “upgrade” button.

Maybe the writer can decide if it the article is free to use? I don’t know - but from my experience Medium is one of the more “open” platforms without any restrictions for the reader.

Strange our experiences are so different.

ethanwillis 5 years ago | |

This is the exact opposite of what I experience. Maybe we're in different countries(I'm in the U.S.) and they're targeting for upgrades based on location.

Medium used to be a great resource, but now I loathe seeing it and I won't even bother clicking a medium link.

BlackiceNetwork 5 years ago | | |

Im in Europe. And I must add, after reading more comments, I always browse private mode, and open new tab for every link that I visit.

So could also be workflow related maybe. Or combi of both?

Maybe share a medium with “upgrade” link that I can visit and compare end-results?

7373737373 5 years ago |

More importantly, they should add the "View Image" button again, ffs

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes-v...

Jaruzel 5 years ago | |

Sometimes, right clicking on the larger preview image and selecting 'view image' will bring up the original. Not always though.

uniqueid 5 years ago |

  Should Google remove medium.com from search results?

Maybe.

My question is: if we designed the internet and web from scratch, how would we deal with paywalled pages?

It might be valuable, for example, to create a separate protocol for paywalled content (eg: ""cc:"" instead of "http://") and add road-blocks to discourage paywalled sites from using the wrong protocol. That would allow search-engines to filter search results according to the user's preference.

Lurkars 5 years ago | |

At least there is http status code 402 Payment Required. But I think no host want to set an error code as return code for an existing, working page.

tomjen3 5 years ago | |

If we designed the internet from scratch, we should build some way to pay into the protocol, e.g send a header with the payment required info, and then my browser could handle the rest.

It would also make it easy for search engines to label such results, filter them when necessary and hopefully we could avoid so many ad pay sites.

ethanwillis 5 years ago | |

I think part of the problem is with Google eating the ad business. It seems (from my childhood as a comparison point) that if someone needed to profit off of their content it was fully supported by ads and that was fine.

iordachej 5 years ago |

Medium.com will always be free in private windows. In a regular browser they set a cookie to count the number of articles you read.

Note: paying to writers is fine as long as it is not a clickbait

higerordermap 5 years ago |

Disable javascript or open it in private tab.

dimator 5 years ago | |

I was quite shocked to see just how snappy and clean medium is with javascript turned off, via uBlock. Reminded me of the old web. No noticeable functionality loss, other than the auto highlight popup stuff, which is not missed.

franzwong 5 years ago |

I hope they can put dev.to articles to higher priority.

sigmaprimus 5 years ago |

Must be what you are searching and reading about as I have not seen an upgrade button for a while.

Maybe you have something(like malware) in your browser causing this.

Anyways this is off topic but there are work arounds for the site you mentioned and I believe you can even google how to do it ;)

Elect2 5 years ago | |

Medium only hide content after you have read several(I don't know the number) of their articles, that's why you didn't see the "upgrade" button.

I know how to work around, but that's not the topic I'm asking.

sigmaprimus 5 years ago | | |

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.htm

As for the topic your asking about. I say Google should not remove results, especially if your only issue is a paywall.

Here is some info regarding paywalls and Google.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/paywall...

And just for you I will give you a nice Google Operand Tip

Try this in your search:

"What you're searching for -site:medium.com"

Hope you find that answer more satisfying.

netsharc 5 years ago |

No.

What good is a search engine if it doesn't try to point you in a direction where there's a result (even if that direction has a wall (door) that requires payment.

Well, in the ideal world they would show any matching results their crawler saw, but Google already censors a lot of legitimate results, because of local laws.

cma 5 years ago | |

Maybe it should be something like search results are presented under two tabs, walled and free, and free is the default selected tab. And the tabs are at the bottom of the page, so you have to scroll all the way down.