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Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

bradleytaunt.com

121–130 of 215 posts

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

#121

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 It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible.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 think you have to look deeper at the draws people have to work certain places.

I suspect people didn't moralize about working for the monopolistic phone company when working at Bell Labs. They probably thought about the amazing environment of pure research and the top-notch people they would be working with.

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

#122

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 It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible.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…

The trouble is that trusting individual developers at Google is fine, but I don’t trust the overall flow of how things are moving. AMP is one possible response to “websites are slow”, but it also happens to be one that actively consolidates Google’s power in the marketplace and makes things worse for people that try to opt out of the ecosystem. Which is a shame, because it needn’t have been like that.

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

#124

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 It seems obvious that Google is a real threat to the freedom the internet originally made possible.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 think most people just like money

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

#125
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it proves anything, but Kleenex is synonymous with facial tissue and Velcro is synonymous with hook and loop fasteners. I "google" things on DuckDuckGo. :)

Yeah, I've been using DDG for years, but I just can't get "Google it" out of my dictionary. I try to replace it with "Duck it", which feels stupid as fuck to say, but "Google it" doesn't feel any better.

I say "look it up". Took a while, but I managed to do it...

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

#126
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, no.

A programmer's blog is not an ultra-local business.

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

#127
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only thing I don't tried yet is more traditional ads, but I don't have money for that (for example TV ads) When people think "advertising" they often think TV first. But you might be surprised how reasonable some advertising rates can be for radio (especially classical radio sponsorships and news radio), regional and local newspapers, and certain magazines. A web site I used to own advertised with AdSense for a year.…

I replied this in other comment, but here even that got google enroached... The magazine that is popular on my field now focuses mostly on online ads, and they use adsense, so to buyads on the magazine you need to use adwords platform to do so.

Youtube (direct to creator) and Podcasts are pretty good as well.

Some small targeted channels can give good return as good videos are used for reference and you'll get a burst of business at the beginning and some followup later.

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

#128

> 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…

I tried DuckDuckGo for a while, but they have way too many spam results on the first pages, when searching for things in my native language, e.g. tried searching for details about a new tax law a while ago and got a lot of either NSFW spam pages, or pages redirecting to malware. When searching in English it is not too bad, I don't know what is causing this, perhaps just lack of testing/interest for non-english users, or Bing/DDG doesn't run a malware scanner on its search results. Bing has the same problem. Run the same query on Google and there is no spam.

I could try to give DDG another try, but where can I report problems with spam/malware in its search results?

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

#130

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…

It's very possible they genuinely think they're doing the right thing and helping the world. Meanwhile, many, many people outside of that bubble think they're doing the wrong thing. (If only they talked to their users... but I say the same thing about every tech co in general.)

It's the same thing as startups that automate jobs away. Sounds helpful to companies...but it might just piss off the people that are laid off.

I wonder, how do we solve this general problem as a human civilization? Tech people can get together and make tech, without anyone asking, that changes the world and negatively affects people even if the authors have totally moral intentions.

How crazy is it, that I can write some kind of automation software tomorrow that I think will be really cool and helpful, sell it to businesses, and get thousands of people laid off?

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