Hacker News bans Google and all other search engines
Don't worry, it doesn't mean anything.  The software for ranking applications runs on the same server, and it is horribly inefficient (something 4 people use every 6 months doesn't tend to get optimized much).  This weekend all of us were reading applications at the same time, and the system was getting so slow that I banned crawlers for a bit to buy us some margin. (Traffic from crawlers is much more expensive for us than traffic from human users, because it interacts badly with lazy item loading.) We only finished reading applications an hour before I had to leave for SXSW, so I forgot to set robots.txt back to the normal one, but I just did now.