July 11, 2026
Search engine or search drama?
Ask HN: Why isn't Google indexing information about the AT Protocol?
Fans think Google is ghosting a fast-growing corner of the web — and the comments got messy
TLDR: A Hacker News user says Google is failing to show basic pages about AT Protocol, even when other search engines do. The comments quickly turned into a fight over whether this is personalization gone wrong, user error, or proof that Google search is quietly getting worse.
A simple search turned into a full-blown "is Google broken or just weird?" showdown. One Hacker News poster said they tried looking up a basic list of public AT Protocol relays — part of the new social web tied to Bluesky — and found that DuckDuckGo surfaced several useful pages, while Google mostly served up a result that didn’t even answer the question. For a project built around open websites and public information, that felt painfully ironic.
Then the comment section did what comment sections do best: instantly split into camps. One side said, basically, calm down — Google is heavily personalized, so your results may be warped by your own browsing history. That brought the classic advice: try incognito mode, try another device, stop trusting what Google thinks you want. The other side was much less charitable. One commenter flatly said they could reproduce the problem, while another delivered the most savage drive-by of the thread: "Google search has generally rotted." Ouch.
And because no internet mini-drama is complete without receipts, one user dropped an Imgur screenshot to say it worked fine for them, keeping the mystery alive. So now the real story isn’t just whether Google missed some pages — it’s the delicious community argument over malice, incompetence, personalization, and plain old search decay. In other words: the search results were messy, but the reactions were chef’s kiss.
Key Points
- •The post claims that basic AT Protocol-related queries often do not show expected results in Google.
- •The author uses the query "list of public atproto relays" as a specific example.
- •DuckDuckGo is said to return five relevant results for that query, including firehose.directory and atproto.at/relays.
- •The author states that Google had only three of those results indexed and surfaced only the one that did not contain a relay list.
- •The post frames the issue as ironic given the AT Protocol ecosystem's connection to the open web and the frequency of new site creation.