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Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

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Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#221

Post by cromwellian »

Why are being saying 'nofollow' "breaks the internet". First, it's the wrong terminology, nofollow is an aspect of the Web, not the internet.

Secondly, nofollow applies to crawlers, not human beings. It doesn't even "break the Web", it has zero impact on an end-user's experience of navigating links.

What you could say is that excessive "nofollow" breaks PageRank and other search engines. Less melodramatic and link-baity, but more accurate.

What you could claim is that search algorithms are opinionated and 'mold' content and link structure across the Web. That would be true, but unavoidable. It's impossible to have a search engine that would not editorialize in some respect, and any engine that gained prominence for sending lots of traffic would quickly be descended upon by people like Jeremy trying to figure out how to mold content to game the algorithm.

Even if we had some sort of incredible AI based search engine that could understand meaning and nuance like spam, it might still have an editorial opinion that people would optimize around.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#222

Post by dredmorbius »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #165
Myrth wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to send a couple of millions DMCA takedown requests from random sources to random targets, to make this problem visible.

Hurting innocents in the pursuit of political reform isn't the way to go.

The hurt was imposed by the law.

Utilizing the law to its letter and to impose the fundamental flaw in it is simply making that hurt visible.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#223

Post by dredmorbius »

milesf wrote: post #51

My solution has been to recommend friend and family to switch to http://DuckDuckGo.com (or just http://ddg.gg ) This may seem to be an impossible task, but in days not too long ago people switched search providers often. I went from the curated links of Yahoo, to Lycos, to AltaVista, to Webcrawler, to Google, and now DDG. Google got a lot of mileage out of my in my mind with their motto "Don't be Evil", because I had…

My understanding (and I'm a DDG user) is that DDG largely utilizes other services, and to a large extent Bing, for its search results.

But their own moral authority and index reach are limited.

That said, I still encourage using DDG on both privacy and increasing search engine competition grounds.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#224

Post by jayd16 »

nivla wrote: post #111
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?" Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been trying to rank fai…

>In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to fix it. So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword "Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google? Like everything this could go both ways. If you penalize sites for having links from link farms, what is stopping…

Now you're talking about a malicious attack. If that's what it takes for this to be a real issue then I don't think many people need to be too concerned.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#225

Post by crgt »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #217
J_Darnley wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several places in the world have shown that to be effective. And that would be real physical harm.

When has terrorism been an effective way to invoke change in a democratic society?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#226

Post by soheil »

That email is perfectly legitimate. I can see why now someone doesn't want their website linked from a shady website, that maybe at some point wasn't as shady. To say Google is "breaking"the Internet is easy to proclaim maybe only if to get enough attention on HN. He's using the same exact tactic as the one he is accusing Google of using, namely FUD. How is removing links and placing nofollow attr on links breaking the Internet exactly? If anything this will make the Internet more relevant. The opposite doesn't even make sense from the point of view of Google. They're making money by showing you the most relevant search results so if the Internet is broken and less relevant no one will be using their search anymore and they'll lose too.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#228

Post by eevee »

Myrth wrote: post #116
eevee wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is duplicate content made "for users"? Why would I want to find exactly the same prose in multiple places?

* Paginated content with different filters or sorting? Almost the same content on multiple pages * Product with a category name in url, or without, or under multiple categories Both are very useful for humans, but have to be massaged with canonical urls to please Google machines

I'm reasonably sure Google is familiar with pagination and filtering, seeing as that's pretty much the entire thing their own website does.

I don't see how the same product under a variety of URLs, one for each category it's in, is at all useful to me as a human. It actually rather annoys me when the same page has a whole bunch of URLs: I can't tell which is the "real" one, my address bar frecency gets messed up, visited links don't work correctly, etc.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#229

Post by eevee »

ForHackernews wrote: post #108
eevee wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is duplicate content made "for users"? Why would I want to find exactly the same prose in multiple places?

Maybe you run a store where you sell Widget and Deluxe Widget. The only difference is Deluxe Widget has a higher max RPM, but the operating instructions for Widget and Deluxe Widget are identical. As a consumer, if I came to the website looking for instructions on how to use my [Deluxe] Widget, I would reasonably expect to find the same operating guide on both product pages.

Maybe you should collapse these admittedly identical items into variations of the same product, which will reduce the useless duplicated clutter I'd experience when searching your catalogue.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#230

Post by thatthatis »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #43
ForHackernews wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you read the original post closely, it's clear that this is a site asking for a link to be removed--the quoted email isn't from Google. Did you read the article? The reason that site is asking for the links to be taken down is that they believe (apparently based on feedback from the Webmaster Tools) that it will please the Google Gods. Spammy links and irrational fear of spammy links are both unnatural linking b…

"Spammy links ... are both unnatural linking behaviors that result when sites are more concerned with pleasing search engine algorithms" ForHackernews, we say in our quality guidelines to "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines." If the SEO whose email was quoted in the article had followed that advice, they wouldn't be in the position of trying to clean up spammy links after getting caught spamming.

So are you saying that "clean up" and suspicious link notices only happen when a site hits a threshold. A state machine of sorts?

Frankly, I think "spammy link penalties" is an approach that cannot work long term, any negative weight put on links is too easy to game by competitors.

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