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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

#171

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

Searx[1] is easy to self-host and there a bunch of public instances. It's an open source web app that aggregates search results from dozens of provider back ends like DDG, Bing, Google, Wikipedia, etc.

[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#172

Post by matheusmoreira »

zonotope wrote: post #161
matheusmoreira wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Ads are just noise that should be filtered out. To visit a website and be served 100 megabyes of noise along with less than 1 megabyte of actual information... It's an absurdly low signal-to-noise ratio, such an incredible waste. We need to fix the web by blocking these things. No compromises. If a website can't exist without advertising, it should disappear. Eventually, only good websites will remain. Websit…

How will these remaining good websites make enough money to sustain themselves?

Why should they have to "sustain themselves"? If an author wants to put their ideas out there, maybe they should pay for it themselves so they can have their own unmoderated space on the internet.

Authors that rely on advertising have an inherent conflict of interest: they simply won't write anything that offends the advertisers because they're afraid of losing their revenue. Sites like Reddit will nuke entire communities if they prove controversial enough not because they're offended by it but because it causes advertisers to refuse to associate with them. Activist groups can attack and censor anyone these days by putting pressure on advertisers and sponsorships and causing them to pull out.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#173

Post by walshemj »

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…

webp is better than png

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#174

Post by Multicomp »

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.

I wonder if Google could combat this by having every X search pages swap page 1 with, say, page 5? Or give users the option to jump straight to a given search result page by default?

That way the SEO-ignorant sites that actually have the info you want, but get pushed out of the way due to SEO spam, will have some chances at traffic.

I have never written a search engine, so this comment is worth about 1 kb.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#175

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

I just opened it and it downloaded 9Mb with DuckDuckGo privacy essentials ON, and 26.3Mb without. 589 Requests. :-(

A smaller download would be: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/100

Also FIFY: s/Web developers/Suits/

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#176

Post by walshemj »

cj wrote: post #105

One anecdote where their “Largest Contentful Paint” metric fails, and fixing degrades performance: We have a large 300kb animated gif that takes up maybe 20% of the viewport above the fold. The gif demonstrates visually what our service does. A couple months ago Webmaster Tools reported that page as being “slow” pointing to the large image download. So we decided to show the first frame of the gif as a (30kb) png fil…

Cant you use a svg animation di you realy realy need the animations

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#177

Post by sushid »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #172
zonotope wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will these remaining good websites make enough money to sustain themselves?

Why should they have to "sustain themselves"? If an author wants to put their ideas out there, maybe they should pay for it themselves so they can have their own unmoderated space on the internet. Authors that rely on advertising have an inherent conflict of interest: they simply won't write anything that offends the advertisers because they're afraid of losing their revenue. Sites like Reddit will nuke entire commun…

Why should they have to not "sustain themselves?" If a reader wants to read what an author puts out, maybe they should be allowed to be subject to advertising so that the author doesn't have to pay for it.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#178

Post by manquer »

joe_the_user wrote: post #146
matheusmoreira wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Ads are just noise that should be filtered out. To visit a website and be served 100 megabyes of noise along with less than 1 megabyte of actual information... It's an absurdly low signal-to-noise ratio, such an incredible waste. We need to fix the web by blocking these things. No compromises. If a website can't exist without advertising, it should disappear. Eventually, only good websites will remain. Websit…

I hate capitalism. I'm fully an anti-capitalist. But I'm also a realist. We live in a capitalist society and free content has come out of advertising since before the web. It's an annoying part of the present world but not the most annoying part imo. I don't know how people denouncing just advertising expect the publication of free information to work. This society has created a vast plenty. I don't see why advertise…

It is hard to believe that 100mb of payload is needed to show me same amounts of ads on a page. Merely optimising that without even changing your ad volume /model would go miles in establishing the trust that had been lost.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#179

Post by scollet »

bitpush wrote: post #170
dhimes wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/an answering engine/an advertising engine/ FTFY

This meme is tired. We get it, Google makes money from advertising. Your comment is same as "NYTimes is a advertising company hurr durr because they make money from advertising"

Well that's a very rude comment. You are also using false equivalence to halt any discourse on the matter. Doesn't seem very safe.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#180

Post by walshemj »

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…

Depends maybe Panasonics enterprise SEO game is weak - you should rank your product pages on page one
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