My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero • Hacker News Board

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#151

Post by kazinator » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:39 AM UTC

depressedpanda wrote: post #119

kazinator wrote: post #78

Good, Cheap and Fast (let's call it GCF) appears to be a search engine. When you visit this domain, you get a search box. It looks pretty cool, and all but ... Why would/should Google's search engine send users to another search engine? What GCF needs to do is become well-known, "like DuckDuckGo, but for shopping". Then people will save a bookmark (like I'm doing now). EDIT: Unfortunately, bookmark removed. This site…

I don't think it's a search engine at all, the site just happens to have a search box. It looks more like a (manually?) curated list of products that fulfill the criteria of "good, fast & cheap", within various categories.

It looks like a clean search engine when you first land on it.

https://i.imgur.com/mtqISep.png

Scroll a bit down and you see what looks like a footer giving testimonials.

The links to curated categories are off the screen on desktop. No idea what mobile looks like.

Next to the search box, it states that this is by a data scientist. If that is in any way relevant other than in the sense "this is by a smart person", what it means to me is that there is a massive amount of data here which is intelligently filtered and subject to a decent quality search.

The Venn diagram on the left promises good results, eliminating the problem that good, cheap items are needles in haystacks, buried in fake reviews.

Turns out that the data scientist is just writing consumer education advice columns and reviewing some products he has not actually tried himself.

E.g. 4K projectors:

https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-4k-projectors...

There is no way he owns all of those. I would much rather read the Amazon reviews or whatever from people that bought those things, especially from people who had issues. That's in spite of the issue of fake reviews; oh well.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#152

Post by wp381640 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:39 AM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #51

nordic-nomad wrote: post #25

Seems like he has a couple of flag words "cheap and fast" in his URL that others have used in the past as indicators of spam domains, at least I've seen that for email. Even good isn't great to use. And looking at the page naming conventions that carries all the way through. A broad brush penalty to over generalized key words indicative of spam, and shopping site type directories would definitely account for this thi…

Also his website is just affiliate link garbage. I looked through like 12 categories where I consider myself very familiar with the market for what's available and the product recommendations are poor. At best. Half of the recommendations look like your standard rebadged Alibaba crap peddled on Amazon with all the fake reviews that follow. I guess the name of the site is a tacit admission that probably the products a…

I clicked on the gaming monitor category because it's actually something i've been shopping for.

I was really expecting good content and a single recommendation or two that would replace hours of reading crap reviews, reddit threads, etc. but instead was met with what could be auto-generated list of monitors with scraped descriptions and links

I can really see why this would be flagged as just search front-running for affiliate money

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#153

Post by ryan29 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:40 AM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #24

This is one of several posts I've seen on HN lately following a similar trend: sudden and unexpected drops in search engine traffic. On the one hand it must be jarring to suddenly have a drop in traffic. But is it necessarily indicative of a bad administration of a search engine? Popularity of sites shift. People's tastes change. Even without an algorithm change we would not expect search traffic to remain constant.…

I'm not really sure what to think of that site. I think it's above average for an affiliate marketing site, but I also wonder how reliable the recommendations are if they're derived from automated analysis of other systems like reviews, pricing, etc. when we know those are garbage systems that are constantly gamed. Even filtered, it's still garbage in garbage out, right?

I think that (affiliate based monetization) is a really, really tough market to be in right now because Google and Bing are absolutely _dominated_ by low effort, garbage affiliate marketing blog spam sites. There are days where I'd pay per search if I could filter out sites that have affiliate links on them.

The review / product discovery market as a whole is a disaster right now. The last good review site (IMO) was JonnyGURU and there hasn't been a new PSU review there since early 2019 (since Corsair hired him?). The thing that made that site great was that shitty products got shitty scores. It's not like the affiliate marketing reviewers nowadays where everything is 9.5 stars with the primary goal of getting you to buy _anything_ they can slap an affiliate link on. Even the site in this article is a bit guilty of that. "Here's a list of good value products that you can just buy without thinking," right?

Off topic... If the site owner is lurking, I'd love to know why sites like Anandtech, or almost every review site from what I can tell, stopped doing endurance testing on SSDs now that manufacturers are packing them with shit quality TLC and QLC.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#154

Post by KMag » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:41 AM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #146

KMag wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they still won't tell him the password The Google support people should have mentioned it, but hopefully, they wouldn't be able to tell him the password without investing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cracking the hash. https://plaintextoffenders.com/

Is google really encrypting each individuals email based on a password they have no knowledge of? I know privacy oriented email hosts have tried to achieve this, but google? I'd hope the phone tech support understand the goal was to regain access to the account, through a reset or whatever mechanism, and not to just know the password. But maybe if my dad worded it like I did the same confusion could've happened.

> Is google really encrypting each individuals email based on a password they have no knowledge of?

We're talking about giving out a forgotten password, not getting access to email contents.

I used to work on the indexing system, not GMail, but my vague recollection is there are some master private keys (necessary for lawful intercept, etc.) locked in hardware modules for email storage, where very few binaries are able to get the hardware modules to perform public key decryptions. There are strong safeguards on humans using some of the binaries that do have access. Access to these encryption keys is orthogonal to access to the account password. My recollection of the Aurora attacks is that the intruders got access to some systems that were able to decrypt/display senders and subjects, but we believed they were unable to get at the email bodies.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#155

Post by tsjq » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:44 AM UTC

jjcon wrote: post #30

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #8

I’ve had similar experiences with other google products: My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone p…

> My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. I’m in a similar position except I know my password. Google decided for whatever reason that my location was too different and now requires that I verify via a phone number I no longer have. I have access to the recovery email and even get ‘su…

This is very scary situation

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#156

Post by hertzrat » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:45 AM UTC

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #8

I’ve had similar experiences with other google products: My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone p…

Hmm... my mom forgot her outlook password recently and doesn’t have a cell phone so she can’t get any auth codes. She says she can’t find a way to contact support. Any suggestions?

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#157

Post by hertzrat » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:48 AM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #107

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #8

I’ve had similar experiences with other google products: My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone p…

> My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. I've seen this before too. A huge problem right now is the massive tech companies want an unreasonable view into your life. They want your identity, phone number, photo id, location history, credit history, etc. before they'll treat you like a…

Speaking of con troubles, I think Bell (in Canada) blocks Firefox VPN. I can’t connect to anything when not on wifi.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#158

Post by viraptor » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:49 AM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #115

viraptor wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Google? Both totp and second device authentication are still supported.

Recovery email, SMS, TOTP, other 2FA. Now there are 4 ways to compromise your account. Awesome! And the solution, according to Google, is to pair those methods with some other arbitrary factors to make it really secure. Just ignore the fact that almost every option is vulnerable to real time MitM via phishing if a user doesn't understand they're at the wrong URL. So what does Google do? They deemphasize the URL and t…

> Now there are 4 ways to compromise your account.

No, there's 1 way which existed with just the email/password. But it's reduced by the number of people who do realise it's not the right page.

They also support FIDO/U2F, which does the site verification for you, and 2nd device auth which I don't believe you can trigger from a spoofed site.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#159

Post by hertzrat » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:50 AM UTC

ryan29 wrote: post #128

viraptor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no idea why ipv6 would indicate that I’m not a spammer It's likely not about ipv6, but instead it's about your ipv4 having bad reputation in the past. Basically you changed your source address to a cleaner one.

This is very likely the case. Check the IP on a site that does IP reputation scoring [1]. They probably don't have a database of "bad" addresses for IPv6, so it squeaks by for now. I'm sure that'll change in the future though. My current IP shows "0 - low risk" with that tool. Grabbing a random PIA IP shows "93% - Abusive IP" with a warning about being a high risk proxy connection. The random VPN IP is also on SPAM b…

Disreputable and reputable services alike change ip all the time. The only people who don’t are home users and I suspect VPN users. I don’t fully understand how this is supposed to help you decide if something is safe

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#160

Post by Can_Not » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:50 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #140

Triv888 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had that problem too, multiple times, where I knew the password but Google wouldn't let me use it (I almost lost my account). Google doesn't like users that clear cookies, block trackers, etc... I wish that there was a way to disable those "protections".

Do you have 2FA enabled? I suspect that if you have either an authenticator app or a security key, it will use that instead of random heuristics. (This isn't a defense of Google's behavior, just a comment on things that are actually within the end user's control.)

I tried to setup 2FA, Google would not let me setup an authenticator app without first giving Google a phone number.