My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero • Hacker News Board

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#111

Post by bcrl » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #67

bcrl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cross market subsidies make this possible once you've killed off all the competition. Therein lies the danger of monopolies. To be honest, I'm disappointed that no micropayment schemes have taken off yet. I'm perfectly willing to contribute a few pennies to every site that I visit, but there's no good way to do that today. Instead, every time I read an interesting news article that gets forwarded to me by any of a co…

I think there might be psychological issues at play here, sadly. If you click onto a news website from a search engine, and it ends up being for the wrong thing, people feel cheated and will want their money back. This is probably silly, because if you're paying a couple cents per view, you should be concentrating on the value you receive in the aggregate... but people aren't rational, and personally, I don't think I…

Agreed, but there is a "cheap enough" threshold where that doesn't matter. Netflix was like that ~5-6 years ago where there was all kinds of content available. Today I need Netflix + Amazon Prime + Disney+ + who knows what next to get the mix of content that I previously had in that one subscription. I'm at the threshold of no more streaming services now. Fragmentation can destroy markets. Striking a balance between competition and mergers is non-trivial.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#112

Post by dj_mc_merlin » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:39 AM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #58

mullingitover wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search eng…

I meant end-user switching costs, but you raise good points. Barrier to entry and startup costs to a competitor have never been lower. I believe recent court wins make “unauthorized” scraping more openly available, and anti-trust regulations should look at allowing competitors to ignore a Google-only robots.txt as long as reasonable throttling is enforced.

Is it not already legal?

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#113

Post by bcrl » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:41 AM UTC

bcrl wrote: post #111

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there might be psychological issues at play here, sadly. If you click onto a news website from a search engine, and it ends up being for the wrong thing, people feel cheated and will want their money back. This is probably silly, because if you're paying a couple cents per view, you should be concentrating on the value you receive in the aggregate... but people aren't rational, and personally, I don't think I…

Agreed, but there is a "cheap enough" threshold where that doesn't matter. Netflix was like that ~5-6 years ago where there was all kinds of content available. Today I need Netflix + Amazon Prime + Disney+ + who knows what next to get the mix of content that I previously had in that one subscription. I'm at the threshold of no more streaming services now. Fragmentation can destroy markets. Striking a balance between…

A side note: one of the reasons I don't subscribe to more online news sites is that I can't handle changing my credit card number with more vendors than I already do today. I've had 3 card replacements in the past year due to data breaches. This is truly annoying.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#114

Post by ISL » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #7

exabrial wrote: post #3

Every subdivision of Google needs to be broken up, advertising and search especially. Too much in our economy is at stake.

If you break advertising and search into two entities they would still be massive regardless. That would not solve anything.

And search would tank until it spun up a new advertising division.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#115

Post by donmcronald » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #84

koolba wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they even let you enable non-SMA 2FA anymore? Last I checked the TOTP option was gone.

On Google? Both totp and second device authentication are still supported.

Recovery email, SMS, TOTP, other 2FA. Now there are 4 ways to compromise your account. Awesome! And the solution, according to Google, is to pair those methods with some other arbitrary factors to make it really secure.

Just ignore the fact that almost every option is vulnerable to real time MitM via phishing if a user doesn't understand they're at the wrong URL. So what does Google do? They deemphasize the URL and train users to randomly enter their 2FA codes everywhere a million times per day. Brilliant!

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#116

Post by wallawe » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:46 AM UTC

As others have mentioned it could have something to do with cheap being in the domain name.

At this point since you don't have much to lose, it might be worth buying a new domain and 301'ing everything from goodcheapandfast.com to the new one.

You'd pass on most the link juice but lose the bad name.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#117

Post by marcinzm » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:46 AM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #16

Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility. I look forward to watching the company falter over the coming decade. Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would. Ideally they’ll continue burning goodwill by doing things like adding some fact-checking or censorship “features” into Gmail, delisti…

>And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would.

As others have pointed out this site is nearly indistinguishable from crap to a human much less a crawler. Thus Google trying to clean up the crap get's yelled at by you for hitting other sites (which is unavoidable). And if they didn't try to clean up the crap you'd yell at them for that.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#118

Post by creato » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #98

I'm really torn over the author's website. On one hand, the design is much less ad-ridden and well-written than other SEO/affiliate link-driven websites.. but I don't see much value from it. * the reviews for products are too short and vague * until you actually read the top part and realize it was written by a human being, it looks exactly the same as all the other affiliate websites that get deranked (probably the…

What is the real honest use case for affiliate links?

It basically seems like a way for Amazon and other affiliate program operators to deniably outsource black hat SEO.

Not that this particular site is using black hat SEO (as far as I can tell), but many affiliate link farms are. This particular site seems like it is less offensive, but still something that would be annoying to get in search results.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#119

Post by depressedpanda » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:49 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #78

Good, Cheap and Fast (let's call it GCF) appears to be a search engine. When you visit this domain, you get a search box. It looks pretty cool, and all but ... Why would/should Google's search engine send users to another search engine? What GCF needs to do is become well-known, "like DuckDuckGo, but for shopping". Then people will save a bookmark (like I'm doing now). EDIT: Unfortunately, bookmark removed. This site…

I don't think it's a search engine at all, the site just happens to have a search box.

It looks more like a (manually?) curated list of products that fulfill the criteria of "good, fast & cheap", within various categories.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#120

Post by benlivengood » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:49 AM UTC

contravariant wrote: post #11

ekianjo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you break advertising and search into two entities they would still be massive regardless. That would not solve anything.

At the very least it would solve the massive conflict of interest where a service that you can pay to make people find your webpage is strongly intertwined with another service people use to find webpages.

It's impossible to remove that conflict of interest. The search engine maximizes expected utility when serving ads: argmax(predicted-click-through-rate * cost-per-click). That's the only rational thing to ask for from an advertising network, and it's what the advertiser optimizes for as well by running the ad auction in the first place. It doesn't matter who computes the ad-quality score (the predictor of click-through rate); rational actors with sufficient information will agree on the value.

One could artificially prevent the search engine from e.g. sending keywords and viewer profiles to the ad network, but that is a completely separate regulatory approach from monopoly-busting.

While we're stumbling around the regulatory possibility landscape why not just ban advertising altogether? It's a ~1% drain on the economy that people who know better go out of their way to block.