[nbpoole]

Luckily, this question has been asked and answered fairly recently!

Specifically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955043 from last week, complete with a response from Matt Cutts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955374):

> It's not that PG has a grudge against Google (or vice versa) or anything like that. I believe that search engine bots crawl Hacker News hard enough that PG blocks most crawling by bots. In the case of Google, he does allow us to crawl from some IP addresses, but it's true that Google isn't able to crawl/index every page on Hacker News.

> Here's a link where I answered the same question about three weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837004 , so this isn't a new issue. In fact, PG has been blocking various bots since 2011 or so; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277661 is one of the original discussions about this.

> And to show this isn't a Google-specific issue, note that Bing's #1 result for the search [hacker news] is a completely different site, thehackernews.com: http://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news

> In general, I think PG's priority is to have a useful, interesting site for hackers. That takes precedence and is the reason why I believe PG blocks most bots: so that crawling doesn't overload the site.

[jayjay1010]

Well I can't no longer find the site by searching for the brand anymore and I'm sure this will dramatically change the traffic the site gets.

[thaumaturgy]

Good.

[cgjung]

I'm not buying the answer Matt gave. HN was "banned" because of the anti-google comments expressed on this site.

Google doesn't want other people (who are unaware google is selling their privacy to the NSA) to accidentally stumble across the comments on HN.

[SkyMarshal]

I doubt that.

https://www.google.com/#q=google+sucks

https://www.google.com/#q=google+spying