Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

theluddite.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 551 posts

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#61

Post by dylan604 »

ajross wrote: post #47
carl_sandland wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but (1) we did once[1], because you're right that it seems like an obvious fit. But in practice (2) it got absolutely crushed in the market performance-wise by more sophisticated algorithms like Facebook's and Google's (Amazon plays in this world too, though they have an easier space to search). It turns out that the fundamental game in the ad world isn't serving ads that site admin…

It wasn't just the meta tags that were abused. People were adding text into invisible elements, or text as the same color as the background, etc. This was the precursor to SEO and ads really, and just people trying to get listed higher in search.

As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#63

Post by jdewerd »

bruce511 wrote: post #44
rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site? You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?

The complaint was about Google's "talk to the hand" onboarding/feedback process, not the preferences of advertisers.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#64

Post by dylan604 »

Nevermark wrote: post #22

So Google Search sends people to this (originally simple popular) site, but it’s not ad worthy? They would rather send people to large piles of crap? So broken - I can’t even come up with an enshittification idiocratic economic game theory drunk CFO rationalization for that.

What do you mean? The logical thing is $. That's it. Nothing hidden here. Google knows how many times it sends people there. I can't imagine that it's any significant numbers in Google terms of numbers. The author says it "gets a steady stream of traffic", but no definition of what that actually means. It's probably a rounding number of a rounding number to Googs. With that in mind, yeah, it's not worth it to Googs even if it magically returns this site when the very niche phrase "apportionment calculator" is used. I can say that until this article I had never seen those two words together.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#65

Post by some-natalie »

The author has a very valid point about recipe websites. If you don't have a couple hundred words of prose and some multimedia, even if it's complete nonsense, it may as well not exist according to search engines. It's not just ad sales, though. It's also search rankings and even organic traffic.

I put some family recipes on my personal (mostly tech) blog under another category in my sidebar. Taking a verbatim couple words that should be reasonably unique from a recipe there doesn't show up in searches for it. I took a quick look at my traffic analytics and apart from myself, it gets an imperceptible (perhaps 1 or 2) unique visitors each week out of the average 500-ish. I'd imagine a few things are at play:

- most folks find my site looking for tech things, not recipes

- most websites have a "single theme" - I just don't want to follow that because it's mine and I have other interests :)

- I do not at all care how many people copy my recipe for grilled bread or whatnot.

- I also don't run pictures because I don't want to.

What I do care about is that I like the look of _my_ recipes when _I_ need them, much like the recipe sites that existed 10 or more years ago.

https://some-natalie.dev/recipes/grill-bread/ for easy grilled bread.

If there's any call to action here, please put some of your own recipes or hobby activities or game things or anything else on your site. You're an interesting whole human being and it's okay to be that (even if our search engine overlords don't reward that).

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#66

Post by daedrdev »

rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

It is possible that a policy like this makes society worse off.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#67

Post by j33zusjuice »

Repulsion9513 wrote: post #57
zeroCalories wrote: post #52

Have you thought about alternative monetization methods like Buy Me A Coffee? A good "this work is done for free pleading emoji " message can get you some decent cash. Maybe selling your site to someone that can monetize it is your best bet. Yeah your site isn't what Google Ads wants, that's a shame, but then that's on you to come up with an alternative.

Why does it have to be on them to come up with an alternative instead of... like... acknowledging that monopolies and businesses approaching them are harmful to both consumers and businesses?

Look no further than Google fucking around either third-party cookies every year to demonstrate how overpowered they are.

Think whatever you want of the ad industry, but Google flipping on that every year changes the project roadmap for every competitor in the adtech world. And when they flip again mid-year, it can invalidate months of work that teams have done.

In the end, all adtech companies are happy to see third-party cookies survive, so no one complains when Google backs out of killing them, but the point is that Google’s decisions change the project roadmaps for every competitor because no one is actually competing with Google. They have entirely too much control over the way the internet runs.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#68

Post by dools »

bruce511 wrote: post #29

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…

Funnily enough, tools are best monetised as SEO enhancers. His tool would have incredible page rank, and by linking to a "Made with love by congressblog.com" from that tool (and all the others he has made) and then populating congressblog.com with lots of content about like, congress, he could monetise THAT site with ads. He didn't have to ruin the calculator.

EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#69

Post by therebedragons »

brg wrote: post #30
rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

I wish this preference applied to governments as well. No government should have dominion over more than either a a certain percentage of people nor a certain percentage of production capacity.

[dead]

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#70

Post by worewood »

rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

What you're saying is heresy in a capitalist world.

It absolutely is the root of all problems, but people, consciously or not, will deny it and try to justify how it is necessary or how accumulated capital is not the issue.

Beware of that while reading the responses.

Post reply on HN