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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

#61

Post by pricecomstock »

slantyyz wrote: post #46
blueboo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It feels a little dirty, but this FireFox extension will fix that for you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-w3school...

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#62

Post by freedomben »

verdverm wrote: post #7
MattGaiser wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is always the trade-off between higher quality through what is essentially regulation and standards and squeezing out those who don't comply (which disadvantages new entrants). With drugs, we weight that trade-off heavily towards higher quality over new entrants. The question is, is that an acceptable trade off on the web? Reading this, I now think I should go put AMP on my personal blog. Before that, I needed…

Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free. The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors I would not recommend AMP, but there are dozens of standards that are not part of what the public sees, low level enough they don't care to see. These are the important things Google has caused the world to adopt as best practices. You don't have to have http, but you are…

> Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free. The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors

This heavily pushes the web toward centralization, which I see as a really bad thing, in many ways the cure is worse than the disease. It's happening in so many ways (have you tried standing up your own email server?) and this sort of thing drives it the hardest.

I don't think Google is all bad, in fact I appreciate a lot of what they have done for the world (you mention some of these things). But as with nearly everything in life, it's complicated. I worry a lot that we're headed towards an internet where the individual is at the mercy of organizations to allow them to have a voice.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#63

Post by verdverm »

amelius wrote: post #56
tschellenbach wrote: post #10

It's funny that Google is so large, that one way to grow their business is to improve the user experience of the internet as a whole.

> Google is so large, that one way to grow their business is to improve the user experience of the internet as a whole. (where user = advertiser)

User == user

Advertiser == 0.6 * customer

Their revenues are increasingly diversified, Google received far more dollars from myself and company via non ad revenues, more than $1000 / month now and growing (re: gcloud)

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#64

Post by ocdtrekkie »

verdverm wrote: post #12
mhh__ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did Google ever do for us?

How many Google services and systems do you rely on each day?

None. And I would not trust a service today that depends on any Google service either.

I'll visit YouTube for free entertainment sometimes, but I hardly depend on it for anything, and I really wish more creators posted their content elsewhere, even at a price.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#65

Post by TeMPOraL »

zero_shift wrote: post #54
downerending wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who decides what is and isn't cruft? You? Is data journalism cruft? Are web applications? Is Google Office cruft? What about the web application my parents have been using to order groceries during the pandemic - that has loads of JS, and loads of CSS to make it readable to anyone over 40. Does that qualify as cruft? Are dyslexia friendly styelsheets cruft? Is Google Maps cruft? It's full of JavaScript. Are browser g…

That it works is table stakes. A web application your parents wouldn't be able to use to order groceries because it was so broken wouldn't even be discussed, it would be pulled off the Internet and replaced with something that works.

The criticism about cruft is one level up. Not about how to accomplish something, but how to do it in a way that isn't extremely wasteful of both computer resources and end-user's time.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#67

Post by TeMPOraL »

verdverm wrote: post #63
amelius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is so large, that one way to grow their business is to improve the user experience of the internet as a whole. (where user = advertiser)

User == user Advertiser == 0.6 * customer Their revenues are increasingly diversified, Google received far more dollars from myself and company via non ad revenues, more than $1000 / month now and growing (re: gcloud)

User == user, in the sense of a drug user. Hooked up, can't say no, will suffer through almost anything, and is a disposable commodity from the supplier's POV.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#68

Post by monadic2 »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #30
monadic2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re only considering the (debatable) positives (chrome sucks ass, folks). If you can’t engage in a good faith discussion why bother posting?

You must not remember the web before google and google funded firefox!! This whole "google has never done anything" meme just seems ridiculous on its face. Google took on and basically CRUSHED some major market players and powers (Microsoft basically lost the entire web and handset markets from a monopoly position) as a result of google service offerings. Check out how much money they pumped into firefox as well - th…

Right, well given that they HAVE obviously done a lot of things, I would interpret them to mean “they haven’t done anything I’ve liked or wanted or expected”, which is certainly fine to express. I don’t see why this justifies brushing away google’s decline with “but their products have engagement”. It’s like arguing because people buy an iphone, the iphone is the smartphone people want—in reality it’s just necessary and mildly better in some subjective way than the competition.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#69

Post by chongli »

slantyyz wrote: post #37
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.

I don't know if it's a combination of overreliance on algorithmic rankings + seo or what, but if I search for something like "Panasonic GH5" (something I searched recently), I want to see the top two ranked items as the Panasonic product page, followed by the Wikipedia page. When I run that search on Google in Canada, there is a Panasonic link on the first page (third link), but it's for the US store listing, which h…

I agree that Google search is horrendous but Youtube is actually manageable. If you want decent recommendations you need to curate your viewing history. If you watch some random video and find a lot of annoying related videos showing up in your recommendations then go into your history and delete that one video from the history. Now Youtube will "forget" you watched that video and stop recommending things related to it.

I use Youtube in a very specific way: I subscribe to a bunch of channels that I like and only watch what those people post. My recommendations tend to be very focused around things related to my interests. Occasionally I will look up a random video for whatever reason and I'm always careful to delete it from my history unless I actually want more recommendations related to it.

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