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The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

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Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#231

Post by BlueTemplar »

buboard wrote: post #123
mojuba wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Losing our support" means a process, it doesn't mean everybody hates Google now, of course it's not the case. > I always question the agenda of people promoting this. My only agenda is my growing frustration with using Google Search and the lack of competition. Web pages can be excluded now for not using any of Google's plugins for example. I see how Search is increasingly becoming a tool for plain old profit maximi…

Comprehensive means centralized. This provably cannot be fair. We can’t have everything. I use bing for difficult searches (google can only understand 1 or 2 words it seems) and yandex for image search. Not bad

Does it, though? The Internet is pretty "comprehensive"...

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#232

Post by marcus_holmes »

nathcd wrote: post #216
marcus_holmes wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then ask them. Startup 101 "Mom Test" stuff. If you ask people what they think, you get their intentions. If you measure their behaviour, you get actual data. Talking to customers is excellent, but measuring what they actually do verifies that they're not lying to you because they're nice people. >Also, what makes you think that your interest in knowing your customer's behavior is more important than your customers…

I already responded to your shop analogy in another comment, so I won't do that here. But - > Or is your objection just to the Javascript? If I "violate their privacy" by analysing server logs it's OK, but adding javascript to measure behaviour is "bad, hmmkay"? If you misuse any data you collect from anywhere, you're being a jerk. We're talking about collecting data in the first place. If you collect data by having…

Again, we'll have to agree to disagree.

I respect that you have this point of view, though. In that I'm glad there are people out there fighting this fight. It needs to be fought, and we need to be questioning these boundaries.

Thank you for forcing me to question mine.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#233

Post by missblit »

hnuser77 wrote: post #187
harimau777 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain your feelings on YouTube in more detail? I find that I am often looking for information in video form (generally because I am trying to learn how to do some physical skill or to learn about something that is innately movement based such as dance). Although I often use Bing's video search in order to not just get YouTube results, the majority of them end up being on YouTube anyways. In general I haven'…

It looks like Bing SFW search is only Youtube, same as DDG. Only video search site I've seen lately is Petey Vid which searches the expected Vimeo, Dailymotion, but also Instagram, Twitter, Peertube, and a bunch of random non-US video sites.

I just tested, and Bing Video Search returns non-Youtube sites even with strict SafeSearch.

This is easiest to check by using the "-site:youtube.com" parameter, but they also show up for certain queries (try "news") or if you scroll far enough down the page.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#234

Post by marcus_holmes »

kkm wrote: post #228
marcus_holmes wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is useful, thanks... couple questions: 1. Do you grab the country from the IP address before anonymising it? (I know VPN's are a thing, but we would like to know where our customers are coming from) 2. Why encrypt with a daily key instead of just hashing the IP address and storing the hash? Do you ever decrypt the IP address? 3. How have you found CloudWatch? I'm logging all requests to our own database, because…

Hi Marcus, Thank you for your questions. Disclaimer: I also work on WTM from time to time, so I hope can answer these questions to some degree :) 1. WhoTracksMe is served via CloudFront, it only get's the IP that CF reports. To get the country, there are two ways that can be used. IP => Country mapping via a Database or additionally, because CF has multiple edge locations, if needed the you could see which edge locat…

1. Ah, OK, that's useful. I was thinking that dropping the last byte of the IP address would still be able to give us the country via database lookup, but anonymise enough. But getting it via CF (or similar) would be a good alternative.

2. Chances of a hash collision on IP address is pretty small (i.e. statistically insignificant). But adding a daily salt would decrease the odds, for sure.

3. Sorry, my bad, I meant Cloudfront, but it's Sunday night here and there has been wine ;) Same question: how has Cloud{{thing}} worked out for you? Is it worth the extra complexity?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#235

Post by nathcd »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #232
nathcd wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already responded to your shop analogy in another comment, so I won't do that here. But - > Or is your objection just to the Javascript? If I "violate their privacy" by analysing server logs it's OK, but adding javascript to measure behaviour is "bad, hmmkay"? If you misuse any data you collect from anywhere, you're being a jerk. We're talking about collecting data in the first place. If you collect data by having…

Again, we'll have to agree to disagree. I respect that you have this point of view, though. In that I'm glad there are people out there fighting this fight. It needs to be fought, and we need to be questioning these boundaries. Thank you for forcing me to question mine.

Cool, likewise! I appreciate the conversation.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#236

Post by marcus_holmes »

headsoup wrote: post #226
marcus_holmes wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button. I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Why is this unethical? And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?

If they're not buying your product and not subscribing, they're not your customer yet.

technically true, yes. /s/customers/potential customers/g

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#237

Post by BlueTemplar »

stopads wrote: post #95
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

Back in 2015-7 or so yes, you'd be immediately dogpiled on here and reddit and most other sites for daring to criticize Google. I was trying to warn people about them and was always banned or downvoted to some shadowban realm immediately. Google isn't the actual problem though, advertising is. The backlash needs to be primarily about ads, not the companies that just lie repeatedly in order to bend all tech infrastruc…

Ads are the worst, but aren't the only issue. Apple and (older?) Microsoft are problematic too without being advertising businesses.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#238

Post by monkpit »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #98
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

> there's no competition to Search on the horizon This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com. What are yo…

> Then why not go directly to reddit.com for your search.

You’ve clearly never tried to use the reddit search. It is almost guaranteed NOT to give you meaningful results.

The benefit of using a search engine is knowing that it will give you the results you want, and not having to rely upon the sites’ own search implementations.

That obviously does not imply that one needs to use Google specifically, but I commonly will add “reddit” to a search query on any search engine to get the results I’m looking for.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#240

Post by BlueTemplar »

z3t4 wrote: post #42
mirimir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not joking. It's not so much e-commerce that broke everything. Although there were many who did argue that. For me, it's been the shift from self-published (and indeed, self-hosted) to Google, Facebook and cloud services. And the tide turned in the late 90s. Edit: When I first got online, it was AOL, CompuServe, EcoNet and The Well. I was on all of them except AOL. And then we had Usenet and websites. And net…

It has never been more easy to self publish ... via Twitter and Instagram. But the real problem is that you only have 1 hour of free time, spread out in five minute intervals during the day. Being an adult sux.

This is NOT self-publishing.
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