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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

#71

Post by ocdtrekkie »

GuB-42 wrote: post #60
monadic2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this were true chrome would ship with ad block and they would accept cold hard cash for their services.

Google Chrome already ships with an ad blocker (it is in the "site settings"). It is, however, very weak. I think Google would love to block ads more aggressively, but the conflict of interest is so obvious it is going to be raining lawsuits the instant they do that.

A more aggressive ad blocker would block Google's primary source of revenue. So no, they have no interest in shipping an ad blocker akin to others.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#72

Post by iseanstevens »

verdverm wrote: post #41
Covzire wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think Google is dipping below the standard of Altivista (adjusted for amount of content). It was out there you could find it but it it might take clever search strings. But it was a tool that worked for the user and priority was helping people find what they want. Vs helping people find what advertisers want now.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#73

Post by skywhopper »

I agree with the general thrust of the article, but not a lot of the details. And then there's this:

> Our phones have as much RAM as my “studio” work desktop

This is unlikely to be true. From what I can find, the latest iPhone has 4GB of RAM, and Samsung is up to 8GB (and they are growing this stat fast to be sure), but no "studio" desktop made in the last five years is going to have that little.

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web > pages nearly instantaneously.

This is definitely not true. It is true that the download time is not large, but between DNS and TLS latency and the fact that most "complex" web pages are built of assets from dozens of different servers, your actual wait time for the assets can be quite long. But even if you discount that, the render time is probably longer than the download time. If your page is that complex, I hope it's very beautiful to look at.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#74

Post by monadic2 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #71
GuB-42 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Chrome already ships with an ad blocker (it is in the "site settings"). It is, however, very weak. I think Google would love to block ads more aggressively, but the conflict of interest is so obvious it is going to be raining lawsuits the instant they do that.

A more aggressive ad blocker would block Google's primary source of revenue. So no, they have no interest in shipping an ad blocker akin to others.

It really makes me wonder what the internet would be like if google had built microtransactions into a browser to support their sites instead, or as a complement to ads (e.g. an advertiser can pay for your time on the site in exchange for an ad, and google would only middleman the ad negotiation, not the transaction).

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#75

Post by reaperducer »

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.

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 ran into this over the weekend.

I had a question about something I took a photo of in a small village, and I knew a priest I met there would have the answer.

I went to Google to find the parish web site, and it's simply not in Google. Not at all. Lots of sorta-kinda matches in places thousands miles away, even when I specified the very unique village name, state, and ZIP Code.

So I dug through the pile of dross that comes home with me after I travel and found an old parish bulletin that had the web address printed on it. It turns out the church has a web site — a pretty nice one — but Google doesn't know about it. Or it's so heavily down-rated by Google that it didn't come up in the first seven or eight pages of results, no matter how I formed the search query.

So I went to the parish's web site to see if he has an e-mail address. The web site indicated that he is no longer the priest there. So I put his name into Google to see where he'd been moved. (I've been told by other priests that unless you're tied to a school or other institution, priests in America are shuffled around every four to six years.)

His name is fairly uncommon, so I expected Google to show me links to church bulletins or announcements about arrival or going away parties, or even church employee rosters, of which there are thousands on the web. But instead, it was page after page after page of SEO spam for "Complete phone number for $priest_name!" "Is $priest_name cheating on you? Find out!" "$priest_name in your city want to meet you!" The few I clicked through just in case had none of the promised information.

I gave up on Google, and phoned the parish office when it opened this morning. He retired six months ago. Here's his phone number.

Time wasted with the company that promised to take all of the world's information and make it available to everyone: 20-40 minutes.

Time spent getting the information the old fashioned way: 2 minutes.

Thanks for nothing, Google.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#76

Post by chongli »

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?…

SEO hackers to outstrip any single team

SEO hackers are taking advantage of Google's biggest weakness: they are an advertising company that makes money on search ads.

If search were run by a nonprofit like Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, it could be made to filter out sites with ads on them. SEO hackers would have no way to get their foot in the door unless they drop all of their ads, removing their own revenue source. This would create a space on the internet for non-commercial activity to flourish without ads and all of the tracking garbage that comes with it. A form of cultural ad blocking that, in the long run, could be a lot more effective than the technical arms race of client-side ad blockers.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#77

Post by underbluewaters »

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?…

Recipes are a good example. Not only am I confident that Google isn't providing the most useful or authoritative results, it's easy to see that they have forced authors to morph their content into a terrible cookie cutter format. Scrolljacking, obnoxious ads, and pages upon pages of introductory text are the norm. At this point I often use image search and just guess at how they made it rather than try to slog through the results.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#79

Post by nkingsy »

kickscondor wrote: post #6
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?

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…

The disconnect between the expectations of impact and the real impact of big tech experiments on the populace is perpetually surprising.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#80

Post by Viliam1234 »

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…

Maybe the idea is to encourage Panasonic to pay Google to get their result on the first page.

Maybe ten or fifteen years in the future, paying to Google (or Facebook, or...) will be the only way to have your web page delivered to anyone.

I mean, why should Google display your page to anyone for free, if someone else is willing to pay to have their page displayed instead. It's not like people are going to switch en masse to something else, just because Google results become slightly less relevant. And when paying becomes the new normal (e.g. it will become normal to pay to have Hacker News on the first page for "Hacker News"), the results will return to be more relevant again.

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