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Google Is Not God of the Web

bilge.world

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Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#41

Post by verdverm »

Covzire wrote: post #36
verdverm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the people who abuse Google search to promote bad things? Should Google not adjust their algorithms to demote bad or harmful content. There are two sides of the coin. Is it really much different from the security cat and mouse game?

No, unless illegal.

It is a private platform, correct?

Would you prefer no search or what we had before Google?

What would search look like of they did nothing? What would the world look like over the last 20 years?

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#42

Post by birdyrooster »

blueboo wrote: post #33
skilled wrote: post #14

Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down. I really hope they have plans to improve this or find an approach that works as a middle ground for generic SEO content.

This seems like a common claim here on HN. I would expect the creativity of the world's SEO hackers to outstrip any single team, so I expect you'rer right. But I struggle to find queries where interesting information isn't in the top handful of links. [badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted?…

Did you actually search “nude stallman”? I can’t bring myself to do it for obvious reasons but I am curious what you saw.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#43

Post by kickscondor »

verdverm wrote: post #11
kickscondor wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem with Google is that in the 2010s they began flagging sites that had too many links as "link farms" - this discouraged bloggers from posting blogrolls and killed many directories. This really damaged the Open Web that the author is talking about. You saw a widespread abandonment of blogs during 2011-2015. (People stopped seeing traffic to their blogs and just assumed blogs had died due to lack of in…

What about the people who abuse Google search to promote bad things? Should Google not adjust their algorithms to demote bad or harmful content. There are two sides of the coin. Is it really much different from the security cat and mouse game?

I always try to support bad things.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#44

Post by ardy42 »

downerending wrote: post #16
kickscondor wrote: post #2

> There is a very reasonable argument for essential services like search engines and news websites to conform to/adopt standards like AMP, but for the rest of The Open Web, ingenuity and risktaking should be encouraged, not discouraged, for the true good of all Peoplekind. Hadn't really considered this - because minimalist page size is often such a given - but, for instance, many amateurs often don't know yet how to…

Actually, I'd be interested in an alternative web where ingenuity and risk-taking would be utterly forbidden. Just HTML, and a very basic subset at that. No Javascript at all, no CSS. So much of the web would be better and more universally usable without "modern" cruft.

> Actually, I'd be interested in an alternative web where ingenuity and risk-taking would be utterly forbidden. Just HTML, and a very basic subset at that. No Javascript at all, no CSS.

Definitely. A lot of the "ingenuity and risk-taking" are efforts to make the web something it was never indented to be (e.g. a binary(ish) application runtime/delivery platform) that has lots of downsides.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#45

Post by buboard »

verdverm wrote: post #3

Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance. Is this a bad thing?

But google isn't pushing, it's baiting. And what you get is all websites look and act the same. A lot of creativity is falling through the cracks. And it's not just google. Why did we need og: tags and twitter:cards when meta tags are already there

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#46

Post by slantyyz »

blueboo wrote: post #33
skilled wrote: post #14

Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down. I really hope they have plans to improve this or find an approach that works as a middle ground for generic SEO content.

This seems like a common claim here on HN. I would expect the creativity of the world's SEO hackers to outstrip any single team, so I expect you'rer right. But I struggle to find queries where interesting information isn't in the top handful of links. [badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted?…

I tend to think search results could benefit from a little bit of curation.

For example, when I search anything HTML, CSS or Javascript related, W3Schools manages to be the top link in many of the cases.

While W3Schools is fine, I guess... I have to ask if they truly represent the best result for my search query.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#47

Post by zapzupnz »

verdverm wrote: post #3

Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance. Is this a bad thing?

If by "made the Internet a safer and more efficient system" you mean "a non-stop barrage of Pinterest results", sure.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#49

Post by IdiocyInAction »

blueboo wrote: post #33
skilled wrote: post #14

Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down. I really hope they have plans to improve this or find an approach that works as a middle ground for generic SEO content.

This seems like a common claim here on HN. I would expect the creativity of the world's SEO hackers to outstrip any single team, so I expect you'rer right. But I struggle to find queries where interesting information isn't in the top handful of links. [badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted?…

Searches on highly-specific/technical terms often fail for me. Also, for programming, I often get spammy sites instead of more "official" sources. For your example, the while loop in python, I would expect the official python resource to be first. I find this even worse in other languages.

I would prefer not to see W3Schools, Tutorialpoint or GeeksForGeeks to be so highly ranked. This problem is even worse when I search for ML stuff, with pages upon pages of Medium blogspam.

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