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Become Ungoogleable

joeyh.name

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Re: Become Ungoogleable

#71

Post by yankput »

superkuh wrote: post #2

It's a fine idea. But what I'm taking away from this post is the link to the Google/Chromium web DRM prototype and summary ... yikes. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environ... >- The web page executing in a user's web browser >- A third party that can “attest” to the device a web browser is executing on, referred to as the attester >- The web developers server which can remotely verify attestati…

The weirdest thing is that GOOGLE of all companies now wants to make an obviously anti-scraping technology.

Oh well, the world we live in

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#72

Post by JohnFen »

Aurornis wrote: post #65
deltarholamda wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a categorically false premise This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search. But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate…

> But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. I typed "Joey Hess" into Google. The author's blog pops up as the first result, presumably because it hasn't been deindexed yet. The first page of results also includes his GitHub and an HN comment talking about him that…

> I think these claims that Google is useless are coming from people who aren't even trying to use it.

Maybe. But I stopped using Google because while it didn't become useless, it did become one of the worse search engines.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#73

Post by deltarholamda »

Aurornis wrote: post #65
deltarholamda wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a categorically false premise This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search. But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate…

> But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. I typed "Joey Hess" into Google. The author's blog pops up as the first result, presumably because it hasn't been deindexed yet. The first page of results also includes his GitHub and an HN comment talking about him that…

"Useless" isn't accurate, but "not nearly as good as it used to be" sure is. At least in my experience.

PageRank was brilliant, and worked as expected. It's now been superceded by... whatever is going on over in Googleland. Some of which isn't Google's fault, per se; the Internet is a lot bigger now than it was two decades ago. Some of it is. Their entire profit model depends on people using Google in a way orthogonal to "search and find and move on," as it was back in the 00s. People pay Google to game Google results. No corporation is going to overlook that.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#74

Post by JoshTriplett »

reaperducer wrote: post #62
OO000oo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

70 yo mother was visiting last month I watched her look something up on her ipad and she typed in "duckduckgo.com" If you want your mother to bake you cookies, tell her she only needs to type "duck.com," not "duckduckgo.com." At least until today. Now I get: Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

ddg.gg still works.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#75

Post by rotexo »

mikem170 wrote: post #67
rotexo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is an interesting set of trade offs. I have first-hand experience. Six years ago, people on one end of the political spectrum mistook me for someone on the opposite end, and doxxed me. My name is similar to theirs, but I have an additional part of my name that makes it more specific. Now, my google results are polluted with the residue of that doxxing event. For a while, I actively tried to remove my google re…

Is this a situation where a legal name change might help, changing your last name like someone does getting married or divorced?

Yes, though as I understand it, that still leaves a public record. Also, I looked into it when I got married, and the sense that I got was that name changes for men are logistically challenging.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#76

Post by buro9 »

Aurornis wrote: post #65
deltarholamda wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a categorically false premise This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search. But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate…

> But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. I typed "Joey Hess" into Google. The author's blog pops up as the first result, presumably because it hasn't been deindexed yet. The first page of results also includes his GitHub and an HN comment talking about him that…

Google don't fully remove you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lfgss

That will return the website as a first result (I run https://www.lfgss.com/ )... but no description or metadata. Lots of tangential results talking about it... the first result is more like a shadow profile, a more fact an exact domain match exists but nothing more.

Two months ago I had almost 7 million pages indexed from that site.

For this community, it was their objection to their content being used to train AI that caused them to request me (the owner / admin) to exclude bots. I surveyed more widely, presented arguments in a balanced way, then when the result was overwhelming I hard blocked all known bots and useragents and pretty much everything that looks like a bot and user agent.

It's early anecdata, but sign-up rates have not been impacted at all.

Several other communities I've run have taken similar decisions.

Defensively with the UK Online Security Bill some of the other communities I run are considering similar things.

Feels like the end of an era, communities seeking to protect themselves from external threats, and search engines providing as little value as search pre-Google.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#77

Post by JohnFen »

scottLobster wrote: post #64

That might work for this guy, but it's a big stretch from "this works for my niche use case" to "everybody should do this". You can dislike the game, but being a martyr and refusing to play it is just giving up potential benefit for virtue signalling, and if he's trying to start a "de-Google" revolution, I would expect a more serious effort than this lone page that many normies would mistake for an error message at f…

> being a martyr and refusing to play it is just giving up potential benefit for virtue signalling

I don't know about this guy, but it might not be virtue signaling. It might be that he simply doesn't want to take part in that "game". So what if he's giving up some potential benefit? Not all benefit is worth the cost.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#78

Post by deltarholamda »

distortedsignal wrote: post #53
deltarholamda wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a categorically false premise This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search. But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate…

I'm not sure that I agree. My brother tried to set me up with a girl last week. She has a pretty uncommon name. Googled her. Found... a lot of stuff. I have a VERY common name. Think multiple (relatively) famous people (photographers, US Medal of Honor winner, enough lawyers to choke a court system for DECADES), but if you google my name and the city I live in (1,000,000+ people), my LinkedIn is like the second resul…

Okay, but now try "what's the best gaming laptop?" or something similar. This is the sort of query that, at one time, would unearth some nerd's web site alongside PCWorld or whatever.

Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles, some of which are on bizarre domains like "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are festooned with ads, also provided by Google.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#79

Post by marginalia_nu »

winddude wrote: post #16

> Google just doesn't matter on the modern web. It matters hugely, it's still pretty much the only thing that matters. That's the problem.

Probably depends on your market. I think I get about 20% of my traffic from Google. It's about on par with Baidu and DDG.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#80

Post by andrewaylett »

One slight problem: that won't remove any pages from Google's index.

It tells the crawler not to crawl the pages, but it won't stop the indexer from recognising that the pages exist, or that they're authoritative for keywords like "Joey Hess", because -- and this was the magic of PageRank -- other people link to the site.

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