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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

#151

Post by not2b »

onemoresoop wrote: post #101
bosswipe wrote: post #95

What's infuriating to me about these types of "signals" to the search rankings is that they have little to do with the content that I'm searching for. Google will hide results that I might find useful because the web master hasn't kept up with whatever Google decided was today's best practices. How about ranking based on the best source for what I'm looking for?

That's why we should ditch google search for alternatives. So far I've been using DDG and am quite happy though it needs improvements in search results they may be the ones to listen to our needs unlike google who is too big to care.

DDG just gives you Bing's results, while avoiding giving Microsoft information on you. This will necessarily produce worse results, but you might decide that this is worth the tradeoff.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#152

Post by marcosdumay »

reaperducer wrote: post #75
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-…

That reminds me... It used to be fun to search about oneself, all kinds of weird references used appear.

Now there is just spam.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#153

Post by dhimes »

user_0x wrote: post #107
modeless wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you can choose to make a website whose sole purpose isn't to attract Google Search traffic, and that's OK! Not every website has to rank in Google Search to be useful.

but that isn't really true. google gets ~80% of the searches on the web. that means that if someone who isn't conforming to google's frankly arbitrary ranking system is being censored, to use strong language.

google's frankly arbitrary ranking system

Oh, it's anything but arbitrary. It's totally strategic, which is why people pushing back against them being able to dictate web policies is exactly the right thing to do.

I now see people link these "amp" web links, where the domain you are linking to isn't the domain you are trying to reach.

That's one step away from somebody seeing

    paypal.ampstuff.com
and thinking it's ok and then getting ripped off.

No.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#154

Post by onemoresoop »

not2b wrote: post #151
onemoresoop wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we should ditch google search for alternatives. So far I've been using DDG and am quite happy though it needs improvements in search results they may be the ones to listen to our needs unlike google who is too big to care.

DDG just gives you Bing's results, while avoiding giving Microsoft information on you. This will necessarily produce worse results, but you might decide that this is worth the tradeoff.

DDG also gives google results. If it grows in adoption it might get better than the two is what I think. If not, some other search engine is welcome, something better than google and bing

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#155

Post by 6510 »

jefftk wrote: post #121
bosswipe wrote: post #95

What's infuriating to me about these types of "signals" to the search rankings is that they have little to do with the content that I'm searching for. Google will hide results that I might find useful because the web master hasn't kept up with whatever Google decided was today's best practices. How about ranking based on the best source for what I'm looking for?

If only one website has what I'm looking for, then definitely give me that site. If multiple sites have what I want, then prioritizing by which sites will give it to me fastest sounds like it both helps me with this search and helps with future searches (since it puts incentives towards making sites less slow). In general, prioritizing speed highly helps small independent sites and over large bloated sites: they typi…

Sounds like a solution that fits your needs. The topics you deal with probably fit that idea perfectly.

I would make it more generic. Have the user provide his system specs and give them the option to filter out what is or isn't reasonable for them.

I use: 1) a decent desktop, 2) a phone with reasonable specs, 3) a laptop with shit poor specs

a) 400 mbit cable, b) free wifi (crazy slow), c) my ISP provides wifi hotspots that are reasonably fast, d) a prepaid wireless plan where 10 euro equals 1 GB

Shortcomings/experience is pretty obvious with each combination. The laptop (to pick just one) cant reasonably open a google search result, the duck works just fine, fb messenger works too, it can download and play HD videos. Most significant but not all that obvious, it has a qwerty keyboard with which I can write substantial amounts of text. If the search result was tailored for this I could see myself use forums and blogs (with comment sections) over prepaid tethering. It's webcam is unsuitably poor.

Edit: pay 5 cents to view a clean page in stead of 1 euro bandwidth to freeze my client all of a sudden seems a fantastic deal.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#156

Post by glaberficken »

jariel wrote: post #132
gok wrote: post #93

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously. The author may be unaware of how ridiculously huge web pages have gotten. I just loaded Wired.com, scrolled down and let it sit for a few seconds. It downloaded 96.2 MB, requiring over 33 seconds on one of those average connections. On a pay-as-you-go data plan, it would have cost about a dollar just to load that one page. The front pa…

" Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains" It depends on how you measure efficiency. Edit: I should add what I would thought would be obvious, and that it is that bloat is related to advertising which drives their bottom line, and I'm doubtful of any existing material alternatives to 'wired.com's already problematic ability to exist. Ergo, the bandwidth is set to optimise for things developers per…

Web-designers and web-developers design and build the things that the people with the money ask them to. It's that simple.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#157

Post by not2b »

dhimes wrote: post #149
addicted wrote: post #127

I think most people haven’t internalized that Google is no longer a search engine but an answering engine. A search engine tries to find all sorts of relevant information related to your query. The more the merrier (it’s searching after all) and then sorted in a way that puts the relevant results first. An answering engine, in the other hand, tries to minimize the number of results. In an ideal world, it would only r…

s/an answering engine/an advertising engine/ FTFY

Both, actually. They figure that if you can get all your answers from Google itself, they get all of the ad dollars and don't have to share. That's why they try to get the implied question answered with pages served from them if possible.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#158

Post by peteretep »

zozbot234 wrote: post #113
bosswipe wrote: post #95

What's infuriating to me about these types of "signals" to the search rankings is that they have little to do with the content that I'm searching for. Google will hide results that I might find useful because the web master hasn't kept up with whatever Google decided was today's best practices. How about ranking based on the best source for what I'm looking for?

Google's ability to surface useful results has been thoroughly defeated by SEO spammers. To a lesser extent, the same is true of other search engines (Bing, etc.) though Google is the foremost SEO spam target for obvious reasons. Given that state of things, there is some sense in promoting more user-friendly pages that are thus a bit less likely to be SEO spam.

> there is some sense in promoting more user-friendly pages that are thus a bit less likely to be SEO spam

If there's a metric that will improve ranking, the SEO people are all over it, and have more incentive and resources to optimize for it than normal publishers.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#159

Post by dreamcompiler »

gok wrote: post #93

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously. The author may be unaware of how ridiculously huge web pages have gotten. I just loaded Wired.com, scrolled down and let it sit for a few seconds. It downloaded 96.2 MB, requiring over 33 seconds on one of those average connections. On a pay-as-you-go data plan, it would have cost about a dollar just to load that one page. The front pa…

25 years ago I used to read Texas Monthly magazine (on paper) because it was some of the best journalism around. I finally unsubscribed when I had to flip through 16 pages of ads to get to the table of contents, and several ads per issue contained scratch-n-sniff perfume samples which meant that reading an article required you to smell like a bordello afterwards.

Wired is the digital equivalent of that now. There's some great journalism in there, but no journalism is good enough to put up with a hostile attack on one's sensibilities just to read it.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#160

Post by ehsankia »

pornel wrote: post #126

There are lots of questionable ways in which Google owns the web (AMP, reCaptcha harassing users without Google cookies, Chrome's "Fire And Motion" web standards strategy), but this one isn't one of them. In the webdev community it's well known that good performance is very important for user satisfaction, and that's backed up by research. There are no ideal metrics, and unfortunately every single one of them has som…

> it's well known that good performance is very important for user satisfaction

Even putting that aside, I'm not sure how them changing from one rank scoring system to another on their own search engine is them playing "God" for the web. The whole goal of Search is to rank items per some metric of "quality", and speed seems as good and fair as any to me.

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