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Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

bradleytaunt.com

101–110 of 215 posts

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#101

> As fewer results of such not-for-profit websites show up in Google Search, competition will be reintroduced to the search market. I don't think it will. While I personally hate AMP, and disagree with many of Google's practices, this is not the solution. Google is everywhere . It is the default search engine on almost every browser, as well as on most devices. How often do you hear someone say "look it up" as oppose…

Outside of tech circles, no one is going to make an effort to even try other search engines People used to say this about Altavista and Dogpile and Lycos before Google. Change is possible, but it's slow and hard. Google is also the best at searches. I disagree with you on this one. It used to be the best tool for searching. Now it's hit-and-miss. I've found about 70% of the time DDG works, and I only use Google when…

> Change is possible, but it's slow and hard.

It is also fast, but you need a product that is better, not just "not google".

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#102

> As fewer results of such not-for-profit websites show up in Google Search, competition will be reintroduced to the search market. I don't think it will. While I personally hate AMP, and disagree with many of Google's practices, this is not the solution. Google is everywhere . It is the default search engine on almost every browser, as well as on most devices. How often do you hear someone say "look it up" as oppose…

although i agree,

> Bing and Yahoo are treated as a joke.

i use bing or others like yandex for image search. google is a front for stock sites and pinterest.

Hmm, maybe bing should focus on image search , use that as a trojan horse to take on google.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#103

I like this. It reminds me of the pizza shop that gave 50% off to 1-star Yelp reviewers[1] or the ice cream truck that charges "influencers" double[2]. It's a statement of "I don't like your system, so I'm going to opt out of the whole thing even if it potentially harms me." [1] https://thehustle.co/botto-bistro-1-star-yelp/ [2] https://metro.co.uk/2019/07/03/ice-cream-seller-charges-doub...

It's not going to potentially harm him, not being listed by Google is arguably equivalent to ceasing to exist. It's a nice gesture, but I cannot imagine how this is good idea in practice, regardless of how you view Google ethically.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#104

I really wonder about the people who work at Google. Surely they have people whose ideals are higher than this? It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible. But engineers still sign up in droves to work there? What kind of engineers are these? Do all of Google's employees simply disagree that Google is a threat? Do they not care? Are they just financially scared…

I don't work on AMP (I've never even written an AMP page); this is purely my personal perspective: The difference is trust: These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users. The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice…

I'm sorry but you are being naive.

> I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google.

Embrace, extend and extinguish. Microsoft invented it and Google now leads the way. Google is a virus on the web. Search, Chrome, AMP, Gmail, Maps... They are leveraging their monopoly and creating extremely user hostile choices. They then back in some plausible deniability based on some potential technical improvement (faster loading times on mobile in the case of AMP).

Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. Anyone above middle management (and even some of them) are extremely rich. If you don't think people like that make decisions based on extending their competitive advantage, you should spend more time listening to the complaints on this site, not less.

I won't even go into the overt political culture that Google has cultivated and pushed on people as that's more controversial. The short of it is: There are a ton of reasons to criticize Google. You should listen to them.

For the record I'm a strong advocate for technology companies (feel free to read my comments), but it's a step too far to claim there are no business reasons behind these decisions and that they are being made in favor of the users.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#105
post #21

There's an easier way - don't implement AMP.

You fail to understand selection pressure. AMP is necessary now for a competitive ranking. This is not a small matter. Moving up or down a single space in search engine results can be the difference between a successful startup and washing dishes for a living.

Very quickly, a strong selection pressure can establish a trait "at fixation", as biologists say. When this happens, AMP just is the web.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#106
post #67
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only works right on chrome, and you have to sometimes pay attention to memory leaks on all their sites. I built myself a workstation with 32GB of overclocked ram... A few times I left it on overnight with a google site open (adwords or gmail), the machine became unresponsive, using all 32GB of RAM and then freezing after running out of swap... I only found out what was happening on a day I was particularly patient…

I AM using chrome! Let me try again: Opening adsense: 6 seconds to load a useless dashboards with 3 extra boxes "we thought you might find this card interesting" I want a sites report Clicking on "reports"... after 5 seconds the left menu loads, while the report on the right still loads... I click "sites" on the menu... The report on the right loads, but it is the default report, not the sites report. I have to click…

> Oh, they say my website has mobile access issues? But it is a bootstrap website optimized for mobile. Clicking on fix issue .... checking live version ... your site is mobile ready..

Same here. That a company with that amount of brainpower fails to deliver the very basic tools to partake in their market really baffles me.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I honestly don't know why so many governments with strong antimonopoly laws tolerate Google shenanigans. To build an anti-monopoly case you would have to do more than show that Google was the only good ad vendor. Are they the only ones that can give you clicks because they are smarter and better at their jobs than every other ad vendor, or are they the only ones that can give you clicks because of underhanded marke…

Reading the FTC's definition of monopolization is strongly encouraged. It's more nuanced than is generally understood: As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintaine…

OP wrote:

> I am currently struggling with Google and been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow.

While FTC's definition of monopolization is interesting, its of particular relevance in the USA. Different legal definitions will apply of Brazil (where OP appears to be from) or EU or The Netherlands (latter 2 where I'm from). Other countries where Portuguese is spoken could be of relevance, such as Portugal.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others mentioned, you can block their user-agent. That will stop most crawling. They have some bots that use browser agents to see if you serve different content to non-google bots. To block those, you can feed their IP's to haproxy or iptables ipset. fetch_google() { for line in $(dig +short txt _cloud-netblocks.googleusercontent.com | tr " " "\n" | grep include | cut -f 2 -d :) do dig +short txt "${line}" done |…

Any clue if Google crawls from IPv6 addresses?

They will crawl ipv4 and ipv6, whichever your DNS advertises for your sites.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is losing value as a search engine. It's great for finding facts but its shit for finding fun. That's really my impression of the internet as a whole lately - there's nothing left of a noncommercial nature.

But at the same time I'm not convinced that the greater reason for this is with easier access to creating internet content we are not simply creating too much garbage to filter out all of it. It is always easier to break a system than build a bulletproof one right? I am under the impression that we are just returning to the mean of too much garbage content that is simply trying to sell something.

We can have a sea of garbage but if sites would restore the practice of linking to things they find interesting or relevant, we'd be able to navigate islands of interconnected non-crap once we find something decent. That's based on the notion that what I think is interesting is produced by people who have similar opinions of relevance.

Re: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

#110

I like this. It reminds me of the pizza shop that gave 50% off to 1-star Yelp reviewers[1] or the ice cream truck that charges "influencers" double[2]. It's a statement of "I don't like your system, so I'm going to opt out of the whole thing even if it potentially harms me." [1] https://thehustle.co/botto-bistro-1-star-yelp/ [2] https://metro.co.uk/2019/07/03/ice-cream-seller-charges-doub...

It's not going to potentially harm him, not being listed by Google is arguably equivalent to ceasing to exist. It's a nice gesture, but I cannot imagine how this is good idea in practice, regardless of how you view Google ethically.

Yeah, no.

Ultra-Local business - eg. ice cream truck - really don't need a google presence in any way.

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