Why not use startpage.com which is doing anonymous searches in google?
Apparently Google hates us now
141–150 of 272 posts
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 log…
“I was having a hard time until I found a great investment advisor.”
“How can I contact your advisor?”
“Their name is ; just search for them and reach out.”
“Great. I found them and their results look impressive. I reached out and hope they get back to me soon.”
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#143Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted…
The 'mail is fine' is an impending apocalypse that most people don't think too much about. Google can dump you at any time for any reason or no reason. Your chances are small, but if it happens its incredibly disruptive. I don't know the durable answer, but I definitely need to complete that step of degoogling, the job just seems huge.
Get a custom domain.
Strat using that.
Route to Gmail to start but easily decouple.
It took me about a year of updates but now I rarely get anything to a @gmail
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#144Why 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.
Someone at Google are ultimately responsible for the overall direction. Saying that a company is made up by thousands of people and they should be judge, perhaps not individually, but at least not as one gigant whole, is asking the employees to absorb moral responsibility, while the corporate is excused of any wrong doing.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#145Earlier 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.
It doesn't solve as much as it sounds. - You can't vouch for downstream invites, so the tree aspect isn't useful. - It's not your fault if someone's account gets taken over by a spammer. - Just because you vouched for someone once doesn't mean you vouch for them in the future. - What should the punishment be if you accidentally invite a bad actor? - Your community has to be large and desirable enough for people to bo…
In the "real" world we keep our relationship bubbles to a small number for just this reason - we have our close relationships, the people we trust, and then we have gradually less and less close relationships - people we know to greet, or know have done x or y or z
We know that people who are on our outer orbits should not be shared with in certain ways.
Our communities are in fact lots of overlapping bubbles, x knows y, and y knows z, but x sees them as a stranger.
The internet changes that dynamic, and we don't yet know how to manage it - we cannot all live in the town square, and we know to be very careful there, pickpockets, thieves, and robbers abound - and we have no idea who is who
Again our historical approach has been places like universities, where we have "trusted" advisors (teachers) who guide us on subjects being discussed openly - but who also ensure that we avoid pitfalls, like heated debates where people abandon logic and instead use rhetoric or violence, and who ensure that commercial interests are managed - that is, some advertisements are allowed, but unauthorised advertising is forbidden
That approach (moderation) has its own set of problems
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
On air reads. Lift a finger for your ads. When I spent more time producing podcasts I categorically rejected (and discouraged my clients from doing) injected ads by 3rd parties. They scream “idgaf” and actual on air reads convert better anyway by huge margins in comparison. Ublock origin et al can’t block those so there’s your solution. Don’t lazily monetize your content.
The actual answer is to move everything to an app and kill your API, so you control everything in a locked down environment.
This is a much bigger issue than just podcasts. It's every form of binary encoded data.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#147Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted…
The promoted links have gotten insane, the first 5-6 links often appear to be ads
Even after that, for whatever reason, the next tranche of links is a mixture of AI slop and shopping links. If I'm looking for information about something and not a product to buy, I often have to, gasp, go to the 2nd page of results.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#148They'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…
Captcha does nothing against the spammers. I have found that blocking email domains from signups works pretty well. My list is at https://www.rejectionwiki.com/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Emai... (this is a built-in feature of Media Wiki and should work ok with most versions)
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#149Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted…
I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has decided to stop letting me see. (I tried DDG but for my use it's been worse than Google).
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#150To be honest it's probably just jank on Google's end. There's a lot of delayed cause and effect in search, and it's much easier to make a minor mistake that excludes 0.1% of websites from crawling or indexing than it is to detect that it's happened except from affected websites telling you about it. Like in marginalia I've had a bug that affected websites in the condition that if the root path didn't support HEAD, bu…
from 511k indexed paged to just 11? that is some serious jank