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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

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

#71

Post by dools »

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 don't think market cap is the right signal, but vertical integration. The worst monopolistic behaviour almost always involves one company controlling multiple parts of a supply chain. That's obviously why vertical integration is so popular!

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

#72

Post by fancy_pantser »

tonyarkles wrote: post #60
oakashes wrote: post #46

It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect: > You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam. At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third.…

I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter. The recipe loo…

I got so fed up with this that I made a browser extension for it. It's in the Chrome Web Store and Firefox as well, but you'll have to build the xcode project in the Safari directory if that's your preferred browser.

https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

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

#73

Post by Brybry »

lupire wrote: post #34
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…

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?

Cause then everyone tells Google that their demographic is the one that shows ads that pay the best.

Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game.

I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.

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

#74

Post by mondobe »

carl_sandland wrote: post #11

thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?

Lol, the exact same thing happened to me. I was about to leave a very confused comment.

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

#75

Post by cyanmagenta »

raincole wrote: post #35
zulban wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary. Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.

Legal age of drinking is arbitrary and people accept it. Hell, even legal age of consent is arbitrary (please don't argue this -- if it's not it won't vary across developed countries). The absolute majority of legal lines we drew are arbitrary.

I think it’d be more accurate to say “imprecise” rather than “arbitrary.” For example, the legal drinking age is set to 21 (or whatever) based on politicians’ estimation of when most people are mature enough to handle the consequences. It’s true that there is no way to exactly specify a perfect age limit, but that doesn’t mean the limit was set randomly without any reason or basis, i.e., arbitrarily. Sorry if I’m being too pedantic; it’s just one of those nights I suppose.

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

#76

Post by jonathankoren »

bruce511 wrote: post #40
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?

We tried that. It just lead to sites adding a million meta words to gather as much advertising as possible. But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?

Temu.

But seriously, there are plenty of ads that are based on geo located IP. Then of course there’s the cookie (and cookie replacement) ads.

Complaining about site content is pretty bogus.

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

#77

Post by albru123 »

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…

> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.

But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.

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

#78

Post by bee_rider »

Brybry wrote: post #73
lupire wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?

Cause then everyone tells Google that their demographic is the one that shows ads that pay the best. Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game. I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.

If everyone that wants to scam Google just says they have whatever audience pays best, that should result in lots of slots for that audience. Somehow that should tank the price, right?

Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.

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

#79

Post by 8note »

bruce511 wrote: post #39
lupire wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?

Well firstly, I'm not sure the site author knows the demographic. I'm pretty sure he doesn't ask that sort of thing before doing the calculation. Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content. Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites". Therefore if you have a site that…

Google has a monopoly though. Multiple monopolies even.

If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google

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