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Apparently Google hates us now

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Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#91

Post by twodave »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #42

Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.

Personifying Google in this way is not realistic. The search team alone at Google is made of thousands of people who are all working on different things with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less. Any release from any of those people could have created a side effect of this kind. Is there a chance it was an intentional policy implementation? Sure. But the odds are heavily against it.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#93

Post by WarmWash »

anigbrowl wrote: post #81
WarmWash wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The difference is that I am not preventing anyone else from finding their content. I whitelist ads on sites that have good ad policies, like limiting ad size, labeling ads, and not allowing animated ads. Advertisers only care about attention, if you don't impose editorial standards they'll contaminate your entire site.

In the tech space, using youtube as an example, tech youtubers, who are widely lauded, still have about 40-50% of users ad-blocking and So thank you, but you are one of about 14 people on the internet who actually use a whitelist.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#94

Post by themafia »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #38
georgemcbay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google neither hates nor loves any of us, the only thing it cares about as an institution is cramming as many advertisements in front of as many people as it can get away with to generate increasingly ridiculous piles of money. This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.

Public corporations have historically been multi-cellular biological organisms made up of individual cells working toward the collective goal of continuing the organism's existence. They're probably most analogous to bee hives. Each cell receives nourishment from the corporation in the form of monetary compensation (and other benefits). Some cells have a more direct role in the "reasoning" process of the organism tha…

> made up of individual cells

I think this analogy is flawed. Corporations cannot exist without laws pertaining to them. They're made up of _laws_. The individual components all have actions dictated to them by these laws.

> If the owners stop receiving value the organism becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.

Owners are people. They're vulnerable to sentiment. There's plenty of failing businesses with their doors open for this reason.

You're attempting to rationalize something in biological terms that's somewhat irrational in logical terms.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#95

Post by hungryhobbit »

zeitg3ist wrote: post #30
hungryhobbit wrote: post #18

They're a wiki. Wiki spammers are relentless now. Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as…

We have very good anti-bot system set up with a good number of Cloudflare fine-tuned rules, limited permissions for newly created accounts, and a very dedicated team of volunteers that patrol the recent edits constantly. I cannot exclude that somewhere on a rarely visited page (out of 37k+) there is a spam link, but I doubt it’s the reason for the deindexing. I think this would also appear on the Google Search Consol…

I'd still recommend doing searches for common spam topics to see if you have "bad" stuff. On our wiki everything looked fine until you searched for (say) "finance" (which most users never would) ... and then you'd find a mess of spam finance stuff.

As for whether it's responsible or not, obviously I don't know. What I do know is that, without all the info, "Google saw malicious content on your wiki" is a far more logical theory than "Google just decided to hate us out of the blue".

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#96

Post by mlinhares »

twodave wrote: post #91
phyzix5761 wrote: post #42

Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.

Personifying Google in this way is not realistic. The search team alone at Google is made of thousands of people who are all working on different things with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less. Any release from any of those people could have created a side effect of this kind. Is there a chance it was an intentional policy implementation? Sure. But the odds are heavily against it.

lol.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#97

Post by pbhjpbhj »

p4bl0 wrote: post #17

The same thing happened with my blog a few weeks ago. It was well referenced for years and suddenly almost all of my entries are not indexed anymore. The Search Console indicates that the URLs were crawled but are currently not indexed, and contrary to technical problems, there nothing I can do to fix it, I just have to accept that most of my articles cannot be found via Google anymore. EDIT: I don't actually think i…

If Google already slurped up any training data from your site, then not indexing it probably gives them something of a moat over anyone using Google search for site discovery.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#99

Post by dantillberg »

WarmWash wrote: post #53
righthand wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social sites should have all have a tree-based invite system. This would allow wiping out spammers and their enablers in a single hit. It would allow vetting of good actors too.

Now you just created a market for farmed "legit" accounts.

Yes, but the site operator can significantly increase the market price for such an account. This makes spamming more expensive.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#100

Post by pbhjpbhj »

logicchains wrote: post #28
georgemcbay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google neither hates nor loves any of us, the only thing it cares about as an institution is cramming as many advertisements in front of as many people as it can get away with to generate increasingly ridiculous piles of money. This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.

All large companies are sociopaths, but few tech companies treat their paying customers with the level of contempt that Google does.

I don't think that's necessarily true - some large companies are coöps, they don't seem to be sociopathic?
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