Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites

Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by dontupvoteme on Monday June 05, 2023 @09:45AM (#36196120)

>Add to that the automatic CAPTCHA-hellban you get if you use "site:" in anything more than a tiny amount

Is it more expensive, or do they just wish to prevent people from being able to cache their own results locally?

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by Gasp0de on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:28AM (#36196626)

I assume it is so that websites don't abuse it to build search boxes for their own sites without showing ads?

E.g. I can build a searchbox on mywebsite.com, and if you type "hamster" I'll just query google for "site:mywebsite.com hamster" and return the results to you. That way, my site can be static but still have a search box, and google has all the work but gets no money.

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by bombcar on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:09AM (#36196389)

I suspect it bypasses some advertising metric and they don't like it.

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by gniv on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:12AM (#36197338)

It should actually be cheaper to run. Much cheaper, since the site operator acts as a restrict on URLs.

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Re:Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites – WTF? by privacyking on Monday June 05, 2023 @06:12PM (#36204725)

Startpage does the same thing when I use sitebut with no captcha to bypass the hellban. Sometimes it just shows no results intentionally. Refreshing the page fixes that one

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