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Become Ungoogleable

joeyh.name

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Re: Become Ungoogleable

#161

Post by twelve40 »

deltarholamda wrote: post #92
distortedsignal wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll try that. Top results (excluding sponsors b/c UBlock Origin): PC Gamer The Verge Games Radar Youtube (channel: Jarrod's Tech) A giant ad showing some laptops to buy Youtube (channel: PC Builder) RTINGS.com PC Magazine Youtube (channel: Top Tech Now) CNET Tom's Hardware Another giant ad showing some laptops to buy Engadget PC Magazine Laptop Mag TechRadar These are mainstream tech press sites. And maybe the r…

>mainstream tech press sites That's kind of the point. Old Google unearthed things. New Google is where you go to find out what the media (and Google) wants you to know. If that's what you want, then sure, Google is great. I used "best gaming laptop" as an example, but you can try "what is the best mayonnaise" if you'd like. My results included Uproxx. Which I guess counts as "unearthing," since I would never go to a…

if people link to Tom's hardware for new laptops (i dont, but maybe it's popular), is that bad? and a sign of googles demise? what would you like to see instead of those results that made you so unhappy? what else should have been unearthed? switching topics from your own initial example is not helpful.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#162

Post by indigochill »

buro9 wrote: post #76
Aurornis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 commun…

> 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.

IMO this is inevitable. It's why countries have borders: resources are limited, and access to those resources needs to be moderated. That's true whether you're a country or a server admin.

We already apply this principle to bandwidth in the form of DDOS mitigation. Some forums/social media spaces apply it to moderation capacity in the form of requiring invites.

We're slowly learning that the same thing applies to information. Which sounds ridiculous in an age where you can drown in information overload, but personal information is obviously a precious resource (judging from what advertisers are willing to pay to leverage it) and even content we write like comments on articles take some time and thought to produce even if we've grown accustomed to sharing it freely and voluntarily. Now we're growing more cautious about sharing even that when we see others exploiting it for purposes other than its intended use case.

This is also why I'm arguing that social media content should in general have a legal license attached to it, so that use in violation of the license can be prosecuted. CC is probably a good general starting point. I think most people have the assumption that their social media content/comments can be shared only non-commercially (opinions may differ on attribution), with an exception for the site that hosts the content (which may in fact actually give itself broader permissions in the EULA).

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#163

Post by yeahjofp »

all2 wrote: post #128
srsQ wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my reference frame, “being discoverable” is an ideological stance. You can have your tribal perceptions and others are allowed theirs. Social norms are immutable physics. Other people’s content is over rated; I’ve been soaking it up for years and frankly none of it has been as moving as the effort of making my own. Social codependency at scale is proving toxic to the species. We can intentionally “great filter”…

I find this opinion to be solipsistic, but also relevant to the discussion because it moves the focus from consumption to production. I find the focus on producing goods/services/etc. to be more palatable than the consumption focused mindset we often see. Yes, we're all looking for information, but should we only consume as a way of life? I'll leave that as an open-ended question.

[dead]

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#164

Post by __loam »

deltarholamda wrote: post #73
Aurornis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 orthogona…

The problem with Google is people professionalizing gaming the algorithm because of the huge incentives to do so. I don't think it's Google's fault and I think the problem is hard or they would have fixed it.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#165

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"This is a unique time, when it's actually feasible to become ungoogleable without losing much."

This is true. Some sites get buried in Google SERPs because of SEO but these sites can see a majority of their traffic from sources other than Google.

In the author's case, the other source is RSS feeds.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#166

Post by the_pwner224 »

vmoore wrote: post #108

My most sensitive searches are when I lookup people online. Google only gets you so far. With enough money, you can throw a few coins at data broker firms and get back solid 'dox' on many people. It depends on how online a person is, and how much they unwittingly divulged to various services (services that sell their data to people-search firms and other brokers). I have the real name of several so called 'anonymous'…

Mind specifying what these services are?

"how much they unwittingly divulged to various services (services that sell their data to people-search firms and other brokers)."

Would a regular person have unwittingly given information to these services?

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#167

Post by __loam »

distortedsignal wrote: post #122
JohnFen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I only see sites that are so good that they constitute the mainstream" The problem as I see it is that the mainstream websites are not good. Search results that gave a broader range of hits than just that sort of thing would be much, much more useful. If I want, for example, to find what laptops people consider the best, none of those sites help me.

Help me out here - could you give me examples of "what laptops people consider the best" pages that aren't in the top of Google? I still don't understand, and I want to.

Sometimes you can get an answer that's better and filtered through actual experience by adding reddit to the search query, but if you're explicitly buying consumer goods, idk why he would be surprised that that result would be a bunch of hyper commercial listicles.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#169

Post by kulahan »

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).

Bro, I'M about to bake you some cookies for this shortcut.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#170

Post by Karellen »

yankput wrote: post #71
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

"Every pirate wants to be an Admiral"

-- Cory Doctorow

https://nitter.net/doctorow/status/1387098297282621442

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