Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results
21 comments
·November 4, 2025someperson
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
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
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.)
negativelambda
I just tested, indeed very good results!
aunty_helen
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.
n1xis10t
I have heard that chatbots aren’t affected by spam as much as Google when you ask them to search, is that true?
JKCalhoun
Not sure. I understand they used to do search though.
(Love the username, BTW.)
n1xis10t
Yeah they’re pretty terrible now. Reminds me, this is an interesting article about search engines getting worse and failing, but the author didn’t get into the spam aspect iirc: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline
add-sub-mul-div
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.
null
n1xis10t
As for point one, is that true? I thought ChatGPT and Perplexity had their own indexes.
ggm
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
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
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
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
Go thing that Google hasn't been a part of my life for a while now. I use DuckDuck for search.
storus
Google's march to irrelevance continues with full steam.
toomuchtodo
Are they in ChatGPT and other LLM providers? No need for Google.
CamperBob2
You could say that, yes.
Anna's archive has already fulfilled G's needs (training Gemini) so now it's time to pretend it never existed ;)