Ooo - Very interesting, I've been looking for something like this.
I even wrote my own version of this a while back, and scrapped it due to the complexity. A standard would allow for the complexity to be wrapped away in a library :)
I wouldn't call offering help/advice to a site you use as "bending over", I reckon any Google employee with access to the right tools would look into why one of their favourite sites has disappeared from the index..
Oh and, It could also have been a sign of a pretty major bug, considering the popularity of HN ;)
No, It sounds like @pg has blocked google bot via a firewall, So as far as google's automated systems are concerned, hacker news was shutdown and thus removed from the index.
I believe Matt is simply offering help/advice on figuring out the best solution for HN.
> Thanks to Yohei Shimomae and the Apache Cordova team for the original design....