211–220 of 329 posts
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With Google featuring progressively more ads and Google content at the top of the results page, it's not clear if it's still in Google's self interest to give users the best results anymore.
This is why there's an aggressive firewall between the ads and search organizations. The ranking team isn't even aware of revenue numbers by ACL.
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Wasn’t there an option at one time to tell Google to hide results from a certain domain? I feel like I haven’t seen that in years though
It still works -site:pinterest.* Even with wildcard tld, otherwise it is still all Pinterest But it is interesting that those kind of Google/search engine feature hardly ever get talked about these days whereas in the past they were considered crucial to get decent results.
I heard there was some incestual stuff at medium-high levels of relevant google org/teams and pinterest in terms of people moving between the companies and being friends/favors. Also that these specific teams at google are mediocre at best now and all the good engineers and product focused people have moved on to greener pastures. Probably why google image search has stagnated hard (I find bing and yandex out perform…
They obviously turn the blind eye, anyone in the business knows that since Google is very keen on blackholing people or companies who use tricks like that. Just another Silicon Valley affluent people love story.
Pinterest spends a large percentage of their budget on gaming the search page. Though I’m sure you’ve noticed in recent years that Google has begun to replace many search results with answers directly from them instead of redirecting you to places like Pinterest. For the better I say. Companies like Pinterest are parasitic and degrade the overall ecosystem of search.
> Google has begun to replace many search results with answers directly from them > Companies like Pinterest are parasitic Surely you mean companies like Google are parasitic?
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It still works -site:pinterest.* Even with wildcard tld, otherwise it is still all Pinterest But it is interesting that those kind of Google/search engine feature hardly ever get talked about these days whereas in the past they were considered crucial to get decent results.
I don't know what the pathway for this is but just -pinterest does it for me.
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There isn't some abstract, mathematically verifiable best ranking, a platonic ideal that all search engines should aspire to. Of course, "quality" applied is a broad term indeed. But there no being a single certain measure of quality doesn't mean there aren't some things that most people would call crap. Google employs a large number of search quality raters and these folks can likely distinguish the terrible from th…
I think what I am trying to espouse is two things. The first is that there might be a large group of users unknown to you and I who enjoy looking at pinterest in the image results and that is who Google wants to cater to. And the second is not that Google is or should be a "pure democracy of algorithmic conformance" but that Google has, does and always will make choices about what is best and that the definition of b…
The discussion is about Pininterest in text searches. My only objection to Pinterest in image searches is that it's paywalled/login-walled.
But larger issue is I'd acknowledge some search results just aren't what I in particular want but I'd claim other results are actually objectively low quality and you seem to want to push things to realm of pure subjectivity, any old crap is something someone might want and who I am to deny to them that pnis enlargement pill.
I would say that the results Google returns involve a number of factor/filters. A. What's considered mainstream, what appeals to many B. What's could be more or less objectively called quality. C. SEO, What results just slip through based on the page spending a lot of time and money appearing like A or B to the algorithm (but not being that).
And Google spends a huge amount of time and money trying to keep C from being the only thing BUT that's still not enough because there's a lot of time and money spent on the other end. At the time, this tug-of-war serves as a moat keeping competitors out. Any Google competitor would have to invest similar amounts of money.
Google has, does and always will make choices about what is best and that the definition of best is up to their discretion.*
I'd love to have a decent Google competitor. But I don't think you have won many friend here by implying that Google's discretion is just arbitrary (as a number of your posts here seem to imply to me). Google won, back when they had competition, by caring a lot about the, uh, quality of their search results. Now that they've won, they're slipping into other things and moreover, the SEO trash are nipping their heels.
Which is to say you won't build Google alternatives on "democracy" but on some concept of quality people will want.
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Applebot was able to get away with doing exactly this but I imagine that's because it's Apple and websites knew that Apple was about to send them enough traffic via Apple News to make it worth their while. I don't know if other search engine operators have tried this but I would imagine they would get caught by rate limiters set for non Google IP's and then they would be blocked.
Still, you keep saying all that as if most websites even notice that they're being crawled, and that their operators are very aware exactly when by whom they're crawled. Like as if the admin gets a notification every time a crawler comes by or something, with precise details about it. I don't think it's nearly as serious as you're trying to make it look.
For me it was a problem of having lots of pages, and having a high cost per request (due to the type of website it was).
For other websites, it is not necessarily about the volume of traffic from bots, but the risk of web scrapers getting their proprietary data. They're fine with Google scraping their info because that's where their traffic comes from. They're not okay with some random bot scraping them because it could be taking their content and republishing it, or scraping user profile data, or using it for some nefarious/competitive purpose.
This has been going on for a while now.
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>Google should be asking from a product perspective if they are providing the search results the user is most likely seeking. I am cynical. Maybe Google's own experiments show that users click more ads when they get frustrated of the Pinterest spam that is technically not spam enough to be removed from the index. What the users are going to do? Use Bing? Google's most optimised version is probably being an Ads search…
>What the users are going to do? Use Bing? duckduckgo isn't horrific. And certainly not for image searches, which is how Pinterest's pollution ends up being noticed.
Pintrest has the worst UI/UX of any website. It is a cancer of the internet, contributes nothing and allows re-aggregation and front-running in Google search as a feature. It baffles me why people use this piece of shit.