Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Is Not God of the Web

bilge.world

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 306 posts

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#191

Post by matheusmoreira »

sushid wrote: post #177
matheusmoreira wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they have to "sustain themselves"? If an author wants to put their ideas out there, maybe they should pay for it themselves so they can have their own unmoderated space on the internet. Authors that rely on advertising have an inherent conflict of interest: they simply won't write anything that offends the advertisers because they're afraid of losing their revenue. Sites like Reddit will nuke entire commun…

Why should they have to not "sustain themselves?" If a reader wants to read what an author puts out, maybe they should be allowed to be subject to advertising so that the author doesn't have to pay for it.

> If a reader wants to read what an author puts out

Why would anyone want to read stuff like sponsored articles which are nothing but thinly veiled advertising? Articles that were pretty much written by PR firms? Why would anyone trust journalists with conflicts of interest? Social media "influencers"?

I want real information. Real thoughts from real people. Not some censored, manipulated corporate viewpoint created to maximize profits. People who actually have something to say go out of their way to tell as many people as possible about their ideas. They don't need to get paid for it. I'm not getting paid to post here.

> maybe they should be allowed to be subject to advertising so that the author doesn't have to pay for it.

Allowed by whom? The user is in control, not the author. It is the user who owns the computer that runs the browser. If any ad gets shown on the screen, it is because the user generously allowed it to happen. Most people do this out of pure good will only to end up being mercilessly abused for the sake of someone's business model. Nevertheless, it is a privilege which can be unilaterally revoked and there is next to nothing that websites can do to stop it. After content has left the server, the author is no longer in control.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#192

Post by userbinator »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #185
gok wrote: post #93

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously. The author may be unaware of how ridiculously huge web pages have gotten. I just loaded Wired.com, scrolled down and let it sit for a few seconds. It downloaded 96.2 MB, requiring over 33 seconds on one of those average connections. On a pay-as-you-go data plan, it would have cost about a dollar just to load that one page. The front pa…

"Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up." As the browser author with the dominant market share, Google could start by not enabling these "wasteful developers". These ridiculously huge web pages can lock up a user's computer when the user's browser is a "modern" and "supported" one but not when the user agent is something simpler. I can read wired.com re…

I find it ironic that you bring up Windows as an example, when the amount of data the parent comment mentioned - ~100MB -- is enough for a full install of Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3... and will yield many times more enjoyment than the front page of Wired.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#193

Post by userbinator »

Multicomp wrote: post #174
zozbot234 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's ability to surface useful results has been thoroughly defeated by SEO spammers. To a lesser extent, the same is true of other search engines (Bing, etc.) though Google is the foremost SEO spam target for obvious reasons. Given that state of things, there is some sense in promoting more user-friendly pages that are thus a bit less likely to be SEO spam.

I wonder if Google could combat this by having every X search pages swap page 1 with, say, page 5? Or give users the option to jump straight to a given search result page by default? That way the SEO-ignorant sites that actually have the info you want, but get pushed out of the way due to SEO spam, will have some chances at traffic. I have never written a search engine, so this comment is worth about 1 kb.

For some queries I instinctively jump a few pages ahead because I know the first few pages are going to be absolutely filled with SEO spam. The remainder is still not free of spam, but has a higher chance of containing what I want to find.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#194

Post by userbinator »

addicted wrote: post #127

I think most people haven’t internalized that Google is no longer a search engine but an answering engine. A search engine tries to find all sorts of relevant information related to your query. The more the merrier (it’s searching after all) and then sorted in a way that puts the relevant results first. An answering engine, in the other hand, tries to minimize the number of results. In an ideal world, it would only r…

...and the answers it gives are often not even right (or wrong).

In an ideal world, it would only return one thing, which tells you exactly what you want.

In Google's ideal world, it would also only return one thing, which tells you exactly what they want to tell you.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#195

Post by pwdisswordfish2 »

userbinator wrote: post #192
pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up." As the browser author with the dominant market share, Google could start by not enabling these "wasteful developers". These ridiculously huge web pages can lock up a user's computer when the user's browser is a "modern" and "supported" one but not when the user agent is something simpler. I can read wired.com re…

I find it ironic that you bring up Windows as an example, when the amount of data the parent comment mentioned - ~100MB -- is enough for a full install of Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3... and will yield many times more enjoyment than the front page of Wired.

It is sad that Microsoft would never acknowledge that some users might want to run older software on newer computers. IMO, it is easier to see the performance improvements in new hardware when running older software than it is when running "the latest" software. I would have run 3.11 for many years on newer hardware. However the goal of the company and the message pushed to its software users was/is always "upgrade".^1 Today, it is "update".

1. Over time almost all user choice in "upgrading" has been removed. "Forced upgrades" is a thing.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#196

Post by aabbcc1241 »

Google Search is an index, it can do whatever decision it like. If we don't like it, we can use other indices, even better, we can build more alternatives.

The web is a open network. Anyone can share content as well as indices. I know it's mostly impossible to beat google, but niche indices has their place to shine.

For example, here, HN is an index of hand picked (mostly great) content, and there are multiple "unofficial" HN variances. See? the web is very diverse and free.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#197

Post by ehsankia »

bosswipe wrote: post #95

What's infuriating to me about these types of "signals" to the search rankings is that they have little to do with the content that I'm searching for. Google will hide results that I might find useful because the web master hasn't kept up with whatever Google decided was today's best practices. How about ranking based on the best source for what I'm looking for?

> today's best practices

Speed has always been a good practice for as long as the web has existed. The specific metric changes, but the goal is the same. It's just that "simple" metrics are very easy to game.

An example of this is how they went from "First Paint" to "First Contentful Paint" to "Largest Contentful Paint". They're all trying to get at the same concept, which is when the page loads, but each iteration gets more precise and accurate. Realistically, as a webdev, if your site loads fast, it shouldn't matter which metric is used.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#198

Post by thawaway1837 »

userbinator wrote: post #194
addicted wrote: post #127

I think most people haven’t internalized that Google is no longer a search engine but an answering engine. A search engine tries to find all sorts of relevant information related to your query. The more the merrier (it’s searching after all) and then sorted in a way that puts the relevant results first. An answering engine, in the other hand, tries to minimize the number of results. In an ideal world, it would only r…

...and the answers it gives are often not even right (or wrong). In an ideal world, it would only return one thing, which tells you exactly what you want. In Google's ideal world, it would also only return one thing, which tells you exactly what they want to tell you .

I think this is true of any “answering engine” in an ideal world. In an ideal world, it would act as a function and return a single output for any input, because any particular question should ideally only have a single correct answer.

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#199

Post by beambot »

gok wrote: post #93

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly instantaneously. The author may be unaware of how ridiculously huge web pages have gotten. I just loaded Wired.com, scrolled down and let it sit for a few seconds. It downloaded 96.2 MB, requiring over 33 seconds on one of those average connections. On a pay-as-you-go data plan, it would have cost about a dollar just to load that one page. The front pa…

> Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up.

So you want Google to use their dominant position to force webmasters into a new paradigm that probably(?) benefits Google more than today's status quo? And when people start yelling for antitrust provisions, will you still back Google?

Re: Google Is Not God of the Web

#200

Post by vbezhenar »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #195
userbinator wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it ironic that you bring up Windows as an example, when the amount of data the parent comment mentioned - ~100MB -- is enough for a full install of Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3... and will yield many times more enjoyment than the front page of Wired.

It is sad that Microsoft would never acknowledge that some users might want to run older software on newer computers. IMO, it is easier to see the performance improvements in new hardware when running older software than it is when running "the latest" software. I would have run 3.11 for many years on newer hardware. However the goal of the company and the message pushed to its software users was/is always "upgrade".…

You can run many old operating systems including esoteric one using virtual machine. Modern computers use very little overhead for virtualization.
Post reply on HN