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Removing my site from Google search

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Re: Removing my site from Google search

#61

Post by pyrale »

cubano wrote: post #57
pyrale wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand why you would assume that the only alternative to surveillance capitalism is "surveillance socialism". This sophism seems to be built on two errors: * that there is nothing outside of pure capitalism and pure socialism * that adjoining "surveillance" to capitalism means we're talking about an inevitable aspect of our society that is combined to capitalism, rather than a specific subset of th…

Of course there are an infinite number of alternatives...I just quickly picked something that sounded decent that tried to make my point about my observation lately that Capitalism was getting knocked around everywhere I looked. In the last Econtalk podcast that I listened to last night, they discussed the loneliness "epidemic" and the author ended up blaming Thatcher-based Capitalism as perhaps the main reason why p…

> Capitalism [is] getting knocked around everywhere I looked.

That's what happened with every social system in the past, and, while failures certainly have happened, we've always found ways for that criticism to result in improvements to our societies.

It would be very surprising for the current shape of our society or, more generally, capitalism to be an exception to the rule, unless you subscribe to the "end of history" thesis.

Re: Removing my site from Google search

#62

Post by ignoramous »

DantesKite wrote: post #29

I like Google, but wouldn’t mind a better search engine, even at the cost of my privacy, so long as I had a choice for what could be shared.

You're in luck, since there's active development in this space: Neeva.com and kagi.com two of the many alt search engines.

Re: Removing my site from Google search

#63

Post by joshuaissac »

antattack wrote: post #39
JimWestergren wrote: post #30

Imagine wikipedia and the top newspapers doing this ... users will start to use another search engine.

Wikipedia should do this as Apple and Google are showing Wikipedia results as their own, robbing, IMO, Wikipedia of importance. Wikipedia is large enough that it should have their own search engine, likely with more relevant results.

It does not help Wikipedia to do that. The content on Wikipedia is licensed so that Apple and Google can show the content from Wikipedia (and this is by design, not a loophole). If the users can get access to the encyclopedic content more conveniently, that is still in line with the project's goals, even if that content reaches the user indirectly via a third party.

Re: Removing my site from Google search

#64

Post by rkarmani »

larrymcp wrote: post #41

The first sentence grabbed my attention, and I was looking forward to learning about the "threat that surveillance capitalism poses to democracy and human autonomy". But then the article fell flat: he gave no examples of that threat, and neither did the linked article in The Guardian. Are there specific examples of this type of harm? The only complaints that he made were that Google makes a lot of money (which I have…

He referenced this page: https://www.socialcooling.com/

Re: Removing my site from Google search

#66

Post by intricatedetail »

jen20 wrote: post #8
new_guy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually read your link? That's not at all what it says.

Quote from the linked article: “ For those of you who relied on the noindex indexing directive in the robots.txt file, which controls crawling, there are a number of alternative options:” The first option is the meta tag. It does mention an alternative directive for robots.txt, however.

Meta tag implies robot is going to fetch the page, effectively at very least using up you bandwidth. It should be illegal.

Re: Removing my site from Google search

#69

Post by greyivy »

rezonant wrote: post #58

A more interesting issue is the opposite -- many large sites have robots.txt rules that Disallow all crawlers except Google. A new search engine either 100% respects robots.txt with the result that some major properties are completely unavailable in their index, ignore robots.txt in these special cases where robots.txt configuration is unreasonable, or- crawl anything that allows Google to crawl it. None of these opt…

Any idea why this would be (other than incompetence)?

Re: Removing my site from Google search

#70

Post by indigochill »

jefftk wrote: post #49
freediver wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry my statement was both generalized and specific at the same time, and that did not turn out well. How many visits does your blog have daily? And what would it take you to remove your site from Google index?

> How many visits does your blog have daily? ~200k sessions in the past year, so ~550/d. Breakdown: * ~30% search * ~30% no referer * ~25% HN * ~7% Twitter/FB/etc * ~8% other > what would it take you to remove your site from Google index? I don't see why I would want to exclude my site from any index? Being in indexes helps people find my writing, which I like!

> I don't see why I would want to exclude my site from any index? Being in indexes helps people find my writing, which I like!

It's essentially a form of boycott. If one believes Google is a problematic entity (too many fingers in too many aspects of our lives), it's a way to sever connections with them at some personal cost.

At least, if you care about search traffic - one might argue the assumption that Google-like search is the default way to navigate the web is one worth reconsidering and encouraging alternatives to anyway.

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