HACKER Q&A
📣 Tomte

Has Google killed the site: search operator?


Google seems to ignore (for example) site:ycombinator.com since today. Is that a common experience or just me?


  👤 mgrandl Accepted Answer ✓
My search quality went down hill over years and now I just pay for Kagi. It’s honestly a breath of fresh air.

👤 brudgers
My experience is that Google search is best effort with a priority on latency. Lots of changes in quality, but never a significant delay in getting something back (internet infrastructure issues aside).

So sometimes site: gets dropped on the floor for me and sometimes "no I really want this" does.

These days everything in Google search is sharded, cached, and partitioned (remember when a page full of results in another language was not uncommon?).

Good luck.


👤 trane_project
Another data point for the operator being ignored. Probably an unfortunate participant of an A/B experiment. But my search quality is close to the point of searching for alternatives.

👤 throwaway798214
Works for me using that exact same search param site:ycombinator.com

👤 kingkongjaffa
Did you try the subdomain “news”?

site:news.ycombinator.com

Also hn has search here: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=search


👤 not_your_vase
It works for me at the first sight (I'm in central Europe).

👤 gabrielsroka
I noticed it yesterday when I used it in conjunction with other terms, but when I removed the other terms it worked okay.

I wonder if the Verbatim option would help here.


👤 huevosabio
It happened to me but only on mobile. And then it was restored.

I think they are A/B testing.


👤 Prosammer
yeah, I use site: every day and this is the first day it is not working for me.

👤 KomoD
Seems to work just fine for me

👤 PlebThoughts
I noticed this also.

👤 danr4
Same here

👤 throwawayadvsec
where do you live?