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Become Ungoogleable

joeyh.name

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Re: Become Ungoogleable

#41

Post by fooyc »

ghaff wrote: post #36
fooyc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google would do anything to make it harder for others to crawl the web. Killing RSS was part of that strategy. News sites will implement these DRMs, but of course they will still allow Google because it is their source of traffic. Alternative search engines and good bots will be locked out.

>Killing RSS was part of that strategy. Oh please. I get that it's more satisfying to blame Google than the faceless masses who had zero interest in RSS and who had a variety of alternatives to Reader in any case. I guess they also had a strategy to kill social media by axing Google+ and user-created encyclopedias by killing Knol.

Not only Reader, but also the RSS support in Chrome and Firefox (whose Google used to be the primary source of funds). And Feedburner.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#42

Post by jijji »

Aurornis wrote: post #8

> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…

Google from 10 years ago is much different from the Google that we see in use today... results are much different it's hard to find what you're looking for.... then of course you have the first page covered with ads so that makes it that much more difficult... then there's the negative changes that they made to the instant searching where you type in keywords and then it provides suggestions which are completely not related to anything that's popular that you might be searching for... The one example that is still true today is when typing "men can", google instant will still show "men can get pregnant", "men can lactate", "men can have periods" as the top results...

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#43

Post by AlbertCory »

twelve40 wrote: post #15
AlbertCory wrote: post #3

I thought the method was to change your name to something extremely common, like "Janet Brown." A variant is to take the name of some celebrity, so that all the search results are for him or her.

Michael Jackson sounds pretty good too, there is him and then some VC dude apparently

Frequently such people add a distinguishing middle name, which probably helps a little.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#45

Post by bigbacaloa »

codetrotter wrote: post #21
Aurornis wrote: post #8

> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…

If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using DuckDuckGo. And we told all our friends and family to do the same. Would it have an impact?

It would have an impact. None of us would find anything of value at all.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#46

Post by nobody9999 »

I have a pretty common name, with a number of famous folks with the same name (mostly dead) and others who are listed on various sites.

It used to be (>ten years ago), Google would return information about me, specifically, on the first page of results.

I made an effort to remove specific references to me and it's been mostly successful. I can still be found on whitepages.com/yellowpages.com and various background check sites, along with a bunch of other folks with the same name.

If you know where I live or my age, you can probably work out who I am from those, but otherwise I'm not googleable (or bing/ddg-able).

Every few years I go and do some ego surfing[0] to make sure things stay that way.

This post caused me to do so again and I was pleased to see that I'm not in Google or Bing results (except as noted above) at all.

Even my pseudonymous handle here is used by other folks on various other public sites, although mine is reported on the first page of searches.

Other pseudonyms I use are likewise mostly not reported either.

Which is just the way I like it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosurfing

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#47

Post by greiskul »

jijji wrote: post #42
Aurornis wrote: post #8

> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…

Google from 10 years ago is much different from the Google that we see in use today... results are much different it's hard to find what you're looking for.... then of course you have the first page covered with ads so that makes it that much more difficult... then there's the negative changes that they made to the instant searching where you type in keywords and then it provides suggestions which are completely not…

The web from 10 years ago is very different from the web today. High quality content is found more and more in closed gardens like Discord. The spammers have gotten better and better tools to automate their production of low quality trash more and more.

A lot of tech people have started to use the trick of adding reddit to their query, since it is one of the few bastions of actual human beings talking in volume in the open web. But even that might stop working, if reddit decides to close itself to google, and the way their leadership is doing things, I wouldn't doubt it.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#48

Post by ghusto »

Aurornis wrote: post #8

> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…

> This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet.

I'm not convinced, though accept that this could be because I am in that bubble.

I can't imagine this average person searching for me on Google, finding nothing (which they won't, because I did the same as the author long ago), and concluding that there is nothing to find. Especially since nobody who has tried to find information about me after real life encounters has stopped at Google.

The more persistent ones did eventual find bits and pieces, but admittedly they were more technically inclined. Even so, none of them — technical or not — presumed that there _wasn't_ anything to find.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#49

Post by ghaff »

xwdv wrote: post #30
Aurornis wrote: post #8

> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…

> This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. The average person isn’t going to google an individual to find their blogs or whatever. The first stop is figuring out their social media destinations. You would hardly expect to find really anything about a person on Google that isn’t a…

>The average person isn’t going to google an individual to find their blogs or whatever.

I guess I'm not the average person but, sure I would. (Though I might look on LinkedIn first especially if I knew their employer.) A Google search would presumably return social media handles among other things.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#50

Post by OO000oo »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #27
codetrotter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using DuckDuckGo. And we told all our friends and family to do the same. Would it have an impact?

Everyone on HN isn't enough to have an impact. And telling friends and family isn't good enough because changing default behaviors is very difficult in practice and they would listen do you, but ultimately keep doing what they're doing.

I agree, but when my 70 yo mother was visiting last month I watched her look something up on her ipad and she typed in "duckduckgo.com" to do it! I was amazed and asked how she learned to do that. Apparently, she learned it from me! She said she thinks it gives better results. Then I set it to her default search engine so she wouldn't have to type it.
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