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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)

#181

Post by kqr »

throwup238 wrote: post #129
tonyarkles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once…

Yup. This is the Long Click metric.

Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for?

If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up?

The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for a while) is a better metric, but also not ideal: did they stay because they found what they were looking for, or was the result just that confusing they had to stay to comprehend whether it was the right thing? Most often it's because they found what they were looking for, but the pathological cases hide in the middle: many similar correct results, winner is the one that makes the user a little slower.

(This has nothing to do with tabs or back buttons, by the way. It happens any time they can detect subsequent clicks on the search result page.)

I've worked in the search space (though on less evil projects than Google) and I still struggle with the question on how to evaluate search. If you have ideas, let me know!

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

#182

Post by RoyalHenOil »

bruce511 wrote: post #124
nitwit005 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing Google has sensible motives. That doesn't particularly matter. What matters is what they encourage website owners to do in practice. Apparently that is to fill your website with worthless junk text.

My point is that Google has sensible motives, and that people with perfectly good sites will butcher them in the hope of making a buck, and then blame Google. Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on. The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google. The owner no…

Google has sensible motives but, undoubtedly owing to a lack of strong competition, they are not very good at serving these motives.

The fact that AdSense can be gamed incentives gaming. Unlike Google, websites like these DO have competition, and so the ones that game the system most effectively make profits and the ones that operate most ethically go out of business.

If Google does not want AdSense to be gamed, they should close the loopholes that make it so easily gameable and that punish honest customers. However, they are not strongly incentivized to do this because neither websites nor advertisers have any good altetnatives, so they aren't meaningfully losing business over it. And so funds that could go toward fixing this are, instead, used in areas that need the funding more urgently.

Assigning fault here is silly. The websites could be better AND Google could be better — but they will not become better without the right incentive structure.

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

#183

Post by larodi »

samdung wrote: post #165

The internet is an SEO landfill ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 ) This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.

With the forthcoming winter of synthetic content, we may easily find ourselves, in the coming few years, forced to resort once again to directories a-la AltaVista and Mozilla's. I really see no way Google would stop their ads activities, as these provide the financial backbone.

In a sense we resorted to the searchable message board, once an university homework assignment, in the form of HN here.

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

#184

Post by plank »

kqr wrote: post #181
throwup238 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once…

Yup. This is the Long Click metric. Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for? If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up? The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for…

One idea, but people will probably hate me for it: If you return to e.g. the google search site (hence: when the long click metric would be triggered) have a dialog on top saying ‘result great / OK / bad-or-confusing’. Can probably be gamed (bot nets trying to destroy the reputation of others) but at least a long time would not automatically mean ‘great result’. (In the arms race to combat destruction, it could be so that a ‘bad-or-confusing’ click would not actually push a value down, just not make it go higher).

Kind regards, Roel

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

#185

Post by gregw134 »

madcoderme wrote: post #157

> I looked into a half-dozen or so alternatives, but all the other companies were either simply Google ads re-sellers, which is an ecosystem I don't quite understand, or were extremely sketchy, and had reviews complaining about how they trick people into downloading malware and such. This is so true. I have tried to monetize my tools with ads quite a few times before, and the only way was to use Adsense. It's actuall…

Doesn't Microsoft have an ad network?

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

#186

Post by jopsen »

Lazare wrote: post #159
tonyarkles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not entirely fair. The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.

Nobody forces you to put ads on anything.

The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad.

Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it?

Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.

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

#187

Post by ben_w »

behringer wrote: post #41
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.

The solution is much simpler than all that. Just make the idea of the public corporation illegal.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.

Corporations are necessary for specialisation, e.g. even knowing what your legal liability is, having someone to enforce health and safety rules, being able to run a production line rather than having one person spend about a year making a single car.

We can't get most of the interesting things we see in developed economies just by sole traders hiring someone directly for each thing without a corporate structure, partly because that too is a specialisation, and partly because that's way too fragile (every such thing either has a bus number of 1, or it's a mediocre reinvention of a corporation).

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

#188

Post by lostlogin »

zrobotics wrote: post #167
samdung wrote: post #165

The internet is an SEO landfill ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 ) This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.

Calling it a Landfill seems accurate. I just searched (on DDG) for the tap size for a 5/16-24 bolt. I got garbage like this: https://shuntool.com/article/what-size-drill-os-used-for-a-5... This isn't even the worst example, since it does at least have the correct info buried amongst tons of Ai generated garbage, but I can't use this for reference, since it tells me 4 different drill sizes. I've had to switch back to…

If there is any chance I’ll use some web content again, I generally copy and paste the bit I want into the notes app on iOS.

You know it’s bad when you trust Apple’s search function over Google.

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

#189

Post by lostlogin »

MadnessASAP wrote: post #172
bruce511 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I think we can agree that at Google scale the business interactions with me as a potential supplier are automated and soulless. On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless. Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rathe…

I cannot tell you how much I despise this idea that a company can be too big to talk to their customers/partners/ products . If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?

They could be a monopoly, then the equation works.

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

#190

Post by auggierose »

MadnessASAP wrote: post #172
bruce511 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I think we can agree that at Google scale the business interactions with me as a potential supplier are automated and soulless. On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless. Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rathe…

I cannot tell you how much I despise this idea that a company can be too big to talk to their customers/partners/ products . If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?

It seems in Google's case, a lot of value.
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