Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

(torrentfreak.com)

63 points | by gslin 2 hours ago ago

24 comments

  • agluszak 2 hours ago

    Anna's archive has already fulfilled G's needs (training Gemini) so now it's time to pretend it never existed ;)

  • ilt a minute ago

    And still it’s the top result in Google if one searches for Anna’s archive. How is it that that search result hasn’t been removed?

  • someperson an hour ago

    Feels weird to say but I have found using Yandex of all places an excellent search engine for content that get taken down by DMCA requests.

    Eg if you want to watch a movie that's not on Netflix using a web stream the search results are far better.

    Feels like Google circa 2005.

    • chneu 37 minutes ago

      I've been playing around with a variety of search engines such as Kagi, Startpage, Ecosia, DDG.

      All of them are better than google in finding relevant results. Lol

      Google is way too "personalized".

      • qiqitori 33 minutes ago

        You can turn off personalization. (Operating under the assumption that most people search for facts, I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.)

        • Ariarule 3 minutes ago

          [delayed]

        • skulk 6 minutes ago

          > I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.

          The same short combination of words can mean very different things to different people. My favorite example of this is "C string" because when I was a kid learning C I was introduced to a whole new class of lingerie because Google didn't really personalize results back then. Now when I search "C string" Google knows exactly what I mean.

    • negativelambda an hour ago

      I just tested, indeed very good results!

  • aunty_helen 2 hours ago

    Google does search now? I mean, it's great to see but I'm not sure how this is going to challenge the convenience of my chosen brand of chatbot being able to find the same info without being scammed by 100 seo optimised junk sites.

    • JKCalhoun 2 hours ago

      Not sure. I understand they used to do search though.

      (Love the username, BTW.)

    • n1xis10t 2 hours ago

      I have heard that chatbots aren’t affected by spam as much as Google when you ask them to search, is that true?

    • add-sub-mul-div 2 hours ago

      1. Your chatbot doesn't have its own internet scale search index.

      2. You're being given information that may or may not be coming in part from junk sites. All you've done is give up the agency to look at sources and decide for yourself which ones are legitimate.

      • n1xis10t 2 hours ago

        As for point one, is that true? I thought ChatGPT and Perplexity had their own indexes.

  • ggm 2 hours ago

    I'm not sure I've ever relied on google to tell me what a site like this had, when the site itself is fully indexed, as this one is. Freetext search over the metastate of title, author, format, date (when available) -seems to work.

    • n1xis10t 2 hours ago

      They don’t have full text search of document contents though do they? I know Google wouldn’t have this for AA pages either, just curious

      • ggm 2 hours ago

        Good point. So there is definitely a social utility in search over text which google does have, for the trove it scanned, hands and cats-pawprints and all.

        • n1xis10t 2 hours ago

          I’m pretty sure Google indexing pages from Anna’s archive would only get metadata, because AA doesn’t have the full text of the books on those pages. I think to get the full text you have to download the torrents, and I don’t think Google was doing that.

  • drnick1 42 minutes ago

    Go thing that Google hasn't been a part of my life for a while now. I use DuckDuck for search.

  • storus 39 minutes ago

    Google's march to irrelevance continues with full steam.

  • chris_wot 17 minutes ago

    Google search keeps getting less useful every day.

  • toomuchtodo 2 hours ago

    Are they in ChatGPT and other LLM providers? No need for Google.