alt Hacker NewsOpenness and accessibility should absolutely be factors in ranking, otherwise where does it end? I dk what twitter requires these days, maybe an email, password and a couple more fields, what if a site starts doing id verification? What if accounts require a subscription? What if all the best content on the first page of your search results is behind a paywall with 3 easy payments of $299
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hombre_fatal • 11/05/2025
You haven’t made a case for why free content should be more important than relevance.
If the search engine orders by relevance, than I can make the decision for myself of where to trade-off with paywalls.
I don’t want a search engine to make the decision for me because it cannot: what if the only answer to my question is behind a paywall?
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It ends with you paying for information. If I need some information and it is only available behind a paywall, then I'll pay for it or I didn't need it anyway.
Google is doing the correct thing in not discriminating against content which is paid or behind login walls. Some of the most important content are on social media, and most of them only serve logged in users.
If you want to decide yourself how search results are presented to you, you should try Kagi for a search engine.