Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

bradleytaunt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 215 posts

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

#191

Post by bsimpson »

techsupporter wrote: post #112
bsimpson wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back. Couple of points from someone who survived working for the Evil Empire when the entire technology world wanted to see "M$," "…

Hard agree.

That post was both an answer to the OP's question and a refutal of the idea that the only way here was evil.

I think it's important for people to recognize an echo chamber and to realize its ramifications. At the same time, I agree that it's important for employees to understand how their products/actions will be perceived (even those of us who don't work on projects that get written about here).

Thanks for sharing. =)

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

#192

Post by hnick »

reaperducer wrote: post #55
speeder wrote: post #32

I am currently struggling with Google and been even considering just straight up creating a Brazilian "Yandex/Baidu" clone or something somehow. My current business is heavily Google reliant, and Google been proving to be a very poor business partner: * Keeps punishing my site both in organic rank and AdWords rank (thus price) for not being mobile, despite my site being intended to be viewed by engineers with big scr…

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 even heard an advertisement here in Sydney the other day for Mailchimp on a mainstream popular radio channel.

Made me think twice about discounting radio as a channel.

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

#193

Post by hnick »

nier wrote: post #190
Fjolsvith wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that?

Never heard of them so I searched the web. Wikipedia says they also provide the Around the Web and Recommended For You boxes at the bottom of web pages. Haven’t read further, but I assume the reaction was prompted by them serving that lowest quality click bait made to look like page excerpts from the site you’re actually visiting.

It is often more than clickbait, it's entirely misleading to the point where if you click (for science) it's nothing like what is shown.

At least that was true when I checked it out years ago when Slashdot started running them. Which is also around the time I stopped visiting that site.

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

#194

Post by hnick »

LunaSea wrote: post #27
bhartzer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are services that track google IPs, those doing black hat SEO and cloaking rely on them. Google is going to crawl, you just can’t stop them from crawling even if you tell them not to in robots.txt. Best option at this point is to add a noindex tag on pages and let them crawl to see it.

Wouldn't that be considered illegal due to the same reasons as scraping?

I don't think scraping is illegal, unless you're hitting protected pages behind a login after agreeing to a Terms of Service, or hitting it so often you'd constitute a DOS attack.

An implied TOS notice on a separate page or footer is not considered enforceable last time I checked, likewise for robots.txt.

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

#195

Post by pxtail »

LunaSea wrote: post #27
bhartzer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are services that track google IPs, those doing black hat SEO and cloaking rely on them. Google is going to crawl, you just can’t stop them from crawling even if you tell them not to in robots.txt. Best option at this point is to add a noindex tag on pages and let them crawl to see it.

Wouldn't that be considered illegal due to the same reasons as scraping?

Lol, of course not - it would be (and will be!) illegal if you would be doing it, google can crawl and scrape whatever it wants.

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

#196

Post by chipotle_coyote »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #186
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The publisher can absolutely get by with measuring how many people viewed which RSS entries, which this can absolutely deliver. Combined with other web metrics of the sort that non-privacy-invading analytics systems like GoAccess and OWA can deliver, there's more than enough information to determine the size of the audience, where they're located, when the most popular browsing times are, what devices they're using,…

> The publisher can absolutely get by with measuring how many people viewed which RSS entries, which this can absolutely deliver. Wrong. The RSS entries are cached by the aggregators, and the publisher never sees how many people have seen them. > It seems to me that you're arguing that publishers -- or in practice, ad networks -- are entitled to track the browsing habits of specific individuals, even if (theoreticall…

> The RSS entries are cached by the aggregators, and the publisher never sees how many people have seen them.

Aggregators like NewsBlur, Feedly, and Feedbin pass on subscriber counts. I am literally looking at my own FeedPress dashboard in another window right now. I promise I have the analytics I say I do, cross my heart.

As for AMP, I'm not sure I see how AMP takes less control away from publishers than RSS does. There's nothing that stops anyone from running an RSS reader which directly hits each web site they subscribe to. Aggregators may be more convenient but they're not mandatory, and this seems to me to be a pretty important architectural difference. Even if we grant that RSS is pretty difficult to monetize, AMP takes my content and cuts me out of any monetization possibility entirely -- and Google may punish me in search rankings if I don't let them do that. Surely you see why that's going to raise some hackles that RSS doesn't?

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

#197

Post by baud147258 »

robocat wrote: post #177
robin_reala wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And worse, there’s already a lightweight alternative format for news stories called RSS.

There’s a better lightweight alternative format for news stories called pure HTML documents (without JavaScript). Google could be a force for good by encouraging pure documents and down-ranking JavaScript crap. Instead they chose AMP for lock-in.

> Instead they chose AMP for lock-in.

And because it made sense for their business of selling ads

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

#198

Post by whalabi »

Had a chuckle because this article starts with: "I read these points in this other article"

...Which links to an article that says: "I read these points in this other (other) article"

...Which links to the article I wrote where I made the points being referred to :)

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

#199

Post by whalabi »

bsimpson wrote: post #99
rangeofmotion wrote: post #39

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 don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework

Regardless of their intent, Google IS strong-arming publishers, by:

* Pushing publishers to do something effectively none of them want to do (and making them pay for it)

* Limiting lucrative Google search real estate if they don't

* Not having any publishers or content makers on the technical steering committee of AMP (3/7 are Google employees, another 3 are platform people who exploit content (Microsoft, Twitter, Pinterest)

You know how I know that Google is strong-arming publishers?

Because none of them would implement AMP if they weren't being strong-armed.

Logically speaking, if publishers wanted to make their sites faster, and considered it cost effective, they would have already done it.

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

#200

Post by anecdotalShit »

heyyyouu wrote: post #52
rahuldottech wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of principle, AMP is a terrible thing for the web in general.

Yes, a lot of people agree on that. But you don't need to block Google from your site to stop AMP.The way this article is written it makes it seem like the only way to have AMP not affect your site is by blocking Google entirely, and that's simply not the case. I think that's why those of us who understand how AMP is used are commenting here -- and you can see that people are confused because other people are posting…

the article clearly states. The reason to block is to improve competition. The lack of competition is the sole reason why google can stongarm amp instead of an open standard
Post reply on HN