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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

#291

Post by freediver »

esperent wrote: post #242
freediver wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to https://www.google.com/search?q=mattress where 100% of all the content you see there is an ad (turn off your ad-blocker just to witness the monstrosity). Isn't this a direct insult to intelligence? And where and when do you draw the line?

There isn't much difference with adblock on or off for this page for me (using Chrome on Windows). With adblock off, there are three obvious ads on the top right of the page, search results on the left. With adblock on, these are gone. In both cases, the top of the search results is a map with a few shops listed, and under this are normal search results. Repeating this on mobile, the ads are moved inline above the ma…

Here is what I see: https://imgur.com/a/OLSWA3K

As far as I can tell pretty much everything on that screen (including map results) is an ad. That's 100% commercial results on a fairly large screen. Plus there is more below the fold.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#292

Post by enonevets »

gumby wrote: post #283
enonevets wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same exact argument could be made for Chrome. Google was extremely late to the browser game and most of the initial switch was on how quick it was in comparison to other browsers at the time.

Can you expand? Chrome seems to be popular but I don’t know the motivation for it.

I was replying to the parent comment above mine stating that Google came late to the browser game just as they did with the search game and if part of what initially made Google appealing was that they were simple and faster than other search engines, that is true when Chrome was introduced as well. Google explicitly marketed Chrome speed as a selling point. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#293

Post by pwdisswordfish2 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #282
pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Linux runs perfectly on old hardware." I prefer NetBSD. I do not need graphics. I make custom images that boot from USB or the network. As for Windows, there was a time, in the 32-bit era, and before the widepsread availability of virtual machines and Windows 3.11 images, when users were compelled to upgrade hardware and Windows versions. It was not made easy for a non-technical user to buy new hardware and use 3.11…

> Microsoft will not facilitate installing older Windows versions on newer hardware It usually works though nowadays, unless you go nuts and try to boot Windows XP or something. Are there any processors that flat-out can't run Windows 7 atm? (Older versions of macOS, on the other hand, absolutely will not run on newer processors.)

If trying to get this work, Windows 7 is a good choice?

Have you ever successfuly imaged Windows 7 from an older laptop and installed it on a new compuer?

I only need Office. I do not necessarily need the latest version, so long as documents are XML-based.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#294

Post by Wowfunhappy »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #293
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft will not facilitate installing older Windows versions on newer hardware It usually works though nowadays, unless you go nuts and try to boot Windows XP or something. Are there any processors that flat-out can't run Windows 7 atm? (Older versions of macOS, on the other hand, absolutely will not run on newer processors.)

If trying to get this work, Windows 7 is a good choice? Have you ever successfuly imaged Windows 7 from an older laptop and installed it on a new compuer? I only need Office. I do not necessarily need the latest version, so long as documents are XML-based.

I have never imaged OS's—I'm sure it's a fine practice since lots of people do it, but it feels "unclean". I always do clean installs.

That said, I was able to pretty quickly install Windows 7 on a then-just-released Ryzen 3950X last October. I do remember there being one hitch, I think I had to slipstream in USB 3.0 drivers.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#295

Post by pdimitar »

twic wrote: post #276
pdimitar wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it though? Nowadays you have plenty of good free CMS-es which integrate directly with Netlify. Sure, it might be half a centimeter more complex than WordPress admin but it's still really easy to grasp for many non-tech people (checked). But even if it was very complex -- which it isn't -- I still fail to see how that supports a model of an ad-supported web hosting.

I think the main cost is producing the content. Researching, creating, and editing the actual words and images.

Sure. Not disagreeing. But those people can make money today as well -- via stuff like Patreon.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#296

Post by esperent »

freediver wrote: post #291
esperent wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't much difference with adblock on or off for this page for me (using Chrome on Windows). With adblock off, there are three obvious ads on the top right of the page, search results on the left. With adblock on, these are gone. In both cases, the top of the search results is a map with a few shops listed, and under this are normal search results. Repeating this on mobile, the ads are moved inline above the ma…

Here is what I see: https://imgur.com/a/OLSWA3K As far as I can tell pretty much everything on that screen (including map results) is an ad. That's 100% commercial results on a fairly large screen. Plus there is more below the fold.

Wow, that's very different from what I see.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#297

Post by onemoresoop »

freediver wrote: post #290
onemoresoop wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that google results are also used. I guess I was wrong about it. Does anyone know why google results are not aggregated as well? Technical or legal reason?

Likely to be monetary reasons. DDG is basically (not entirely accurate but close enough) in the business of reselling Bing Search API and monetizing it through Bing ad network revenue (+some affiliate revenue through Amazon and Ebay). If you also added Google results, your input costs essentially double. Also if so much of your marketing is based on bashing Google, it would be harder to justify such move from a brand…

Forgive my ignorance, I really didn't know all of that. I only my criticism of google for the reasons I stated, they have grown so much that they don't care about their users and their search quality has been deteriorating quite rapidly. In part it'snot their fault as an army of marketers found their way to play the game to push their products up in results but, it's not only that. Google has been acting more and more like a corporate monopoly, they're not what they were when they started for sure

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#298

Post by romaaeterna »

nicbou wrote: post #266
romaaeterna wrote: post #114

I recently began having a lot of problems with Chinese "searchbot" traffic for a website. Filtering it out, my load went down by two orders of magnitude. It made me wonder how much of the purpose of this sort of thing is SEO. And how much slower Google is making the web for everyone by ranking on it, and therefore encouraging the shenanigans.

Every website is different, but if a single bot is bringing your website to a crawl, you should probably start caching a few things and working on performance.

Other people are reporting the same thing:

https://www.hypernode.com/blog/performance/huawei-aspiegelbo...

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#299

Post by Andrew_Quentin »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #215
Sephr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High network utilization doesn't have to mean an unresponsive website. Google cares more about responsiveness. A site is responsive if you can start reading it quickly, regardless of how much network traffic is being used by ads, as long as the ads are loaded asynchronously after the primary content. Penalizing for high total network traffic is short-sighted and would prevent most video hosts from ranking well in Goo…

Do you know how they decide if someone is able to start reading quickly? Personally I find asynchronously loading ads around the text so distracting that I basically can't focus on reading until it's done loading so for me I basically need to wait for the whole site needs to load anyway. In the same vein, I would prefer Google down score all sites with anything but entirely static ads.

They decide by the Wired guys having a coffee with the Google guys or a chat in some party.

Google is people afterall. Corrupt as fuck. That's why plenty call it gulag.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#300

Post by Andrew_Quentin »

yongjik wrote: post #203

(Disclaimer: previously worked at Google search) I think some commenters are attributing to Google an ulterior motive, whether ill- or good-intentioned, separate from its core business. But in this case no such motivation is necessary. Basically, Google wants its users to be satisfied - otherwise it will lose to, say, Bing. So it measures user satisfaction - e.g., if a user clicks on a Google result, and immediately…

How does google know they hit back within three seconds? Oh yeah, monopoly. Break them up.
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