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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)

#211

Post by the_other »

rats wrote: post #206
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…

[dead]

I suspect you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.

I checked four recipes. One was a joke made out of genital references. Three began with near identical “embark on a journey of flavour” pseudo-SEO bullshit.

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

#212

Post by watwut »

jopsen wrote: post #186
Lazare wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people who have bad content are the ones to get money, while those who have good content are not. Logical result is that people with good content stop producing that content while the people with bad content continue producing it and being rewarded for it.

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

#213

Post by reddalo »

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.

We need to collectively stop using Google, but the alternatives are just not as good for some things.

The best one is probably Kagi, but let's be real: "normal" people would never pay for a search engine service. Well, "normal" people don't even know the difference between Google, Google Chrome and probably the internet.

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

#214

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

jmpavlec wrote: post #158
jazzyjackson wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if there was an apple pay button i would have given him a dollar but instead there's "buy me a coffee" which i've never heard of, stripe which im not filling out, and liberapay which iirc is for crypto nerds i wonder if apple makes it easy to accept money with apple pay (they allow peer to peer payments via apple cash after all)

Stripe also has apple pay these days I believe.

They do. Apple, Google and many other payment options. Plus Stripe Link so you can save your card and pay across many sites now.

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

#215

Post by isodev »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205
wickedsight wrote: post #197

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

I don’t know, webrings?

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

#216

Post by smetj »

isodev wrote: post #215
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

I don’t know, webrings?

Yes.

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

#217

Post by calgoo »

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.

When it looks and acts like the spam sites, then what difference is there really? If I have to scroll 4 pages to find the ingredients and then scroll around like crazy to find the instructions (then scroll back and forth while cooking/baking) then it does not matter how good the recipe is, the page killed it for me.

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

#218

Post by makeitdouble »

chillfox wrote: post #204
kqr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel like the problem is trying to turn human experience into a metric. Probably the better approach would be to have a well staffed QA team.

We should be mad at Yahoo for having fucked up. If anything, they could have spun out the search part and be remembered for it,.

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

#219

Post by 7734128 »

antihipocrat wrote: post #120
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…

Google didn't 'make' the site owner change anything, there is obviously the choice not to serve ads and not change the site. However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements. The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to…

It's not only Adsense. Things which are not visible on Google search do not exist, these things are of course tied together.

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

#220

Post by prmoustache »

isodev wrote: post #215
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

I don’t know, webrings?

we definutely need a return of webrings AND curated links page on decent internet pages.
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