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Apparently Google hates us now

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Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#221

Post by atleastoptimal »

I think people were fooled by the 2000s-2010s tech propaganda that the tech/internet companies in general were some sort of utopian benign benefactors of humanity.

All businesses seek to survive, and will use human goodwill until it is not needed anymore. Everyone who thought that Google was opening up the web out of the generosity of their hearts will be shocked when they "feel" nothing when that is taken, because ultimately a company cannot "feel" anything at all, so the OP headline is a silly proposition.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#222

Post by BLKNSLVR »

manwe150 wrote: post #160
andoando wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The promoted links have gotten insane, the first 5-6 links often appear to be ads

Worse, they often aren't even relevant: we searched "passport renewal" and you had to go the the second page to even get the government site that renews passports, and not ad scams masquerading as the real thing. Optimized for engagement, presumably. Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. I don't care if they track me. But when they have been actively try to prevent me from finding the inform…

Like searching for an app in the store. The first result(s) are paid promotions that often have absolutely no relation to what I was searching for.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#223

Post by Cider9986 »

gtfiorentino wrote: post #217
Cider9986 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find DuckDuckGo's search results to be terrible. I use Brave search and I find it to be the best. I've also tried Startpage and I like it better than DDG, but less than Brave. DDG often has scam sites for example when you search for FMHY, https://fmhy.net comes up on all other search engines, but fmhy [.] click comes up on DDG. Same with "anna's archive" returning the fake site annas-archive [.]io.

We’ll take a look at those two sites, thanks for reporting. We’re actively working to improve how we detect and remove scam sites, and getting specific reports is very helpful.

Very cool, thanks.

Here is the list of all the official sites for FMHY (https://fmhy.net/other/backups)

I'm sure they would be happy with any combination of these 3.

1. fmhy.net

2. reddit.com/r/freemediaheckyeah

3. github.com/fmhy/FMHY

As for Anna's, it changes often, but it would be good to only allow the ones listed on the Wikipedia for sites that are posing to actually be Anna's Archive, rather than accessory sites like Github, link directories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive#:~:text=URL,a...

annas-archive.pk

annas-archive.gd

annas-archive.gl

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#224

Post by philposting »

pooploop64 wrote: post #213
aucisson_masque wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google doesn't work I can relate. Just today I was working on my car and I asked Gemini how to remove the Steering ball joint. It all started well, wrote a lengthy answer and then suddenly wiped it all and instead wrote 'i can't answer that, try to ask about another subject'. For the love of God, talking about cars are now also being forbidden by Google. And it's not a one off, I asked multiple questions about othe…

I'm surprised it's still a standard thing to let us see the message getting typed up before it's finalized. The term "literally 1984" gets thrown around a lot but wow what a dystopian feeling when that happens. It's so much creepier than if it just said "sorry that question violates our guidelines" without showing anything.

Agreed, especially as with images it does the opposite. It waits until the image is finalised, then tests it for suitability, and decides whether or not to show it. It would be interesting to see the intermediate steps, but they're not shown.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#225

Post by twodave »

mrweasel wrote: post #144
twodave wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I think the company has plenty of responsibility. I just think it is more likely as someone who has been part of many engineering orgs that this is a latent bug affecting some people than some intentional change of policy.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#226

Post by hungryhobbit »

anigbrowl wrote: post #73
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…

Do you have any basis for saying that this wiki is overrun with spam, or are you just hand-waving? They were explicit in their Twitter thread about not being full of AI slop, and that they checked their list of pages that were marked as 'crawled but not indexed' and found no abuse. I understand that you were taken aback by spam attacks on the wiki you help manage, but it's not reasonable to generalize from yours to t…

As I said above:

>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

#227

Post by kryogen1c »

yegg wrote: post #188
pooploop64 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sister thought it was malware when she was seeing ads for it. Something about the whole overall branding is just bad.

Sorry you feel that way, pooploop64. We are doing a complete brand refresh this year though.

This has me absolutely howling.

I use Bing at work for no other reason than sheer laziness, really. You've inspired me to return to DDG.

Keep on keepin on, yegg.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#228

Post by Cider9986 »

gtfiorentino wrote: post #217
Cider9986 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find DuckDuckGo's search results to be terrible. I use Brave search and I find it to be the best. I've also tried Startpage and I like it better than DDG, but less than Brave. DDG often has scam sites for example when you search for FMHY, https://fmhy.net comes up on all other search engines, but fmhy [.] click comes up on DDG. Same with "anna's archive" returning the fake site annas-archive [.]io.

We’ll take a look at those two sites, thanks for reporting. We’re actively working to improve how we detect and remove scam sites, and getting specific reports is very helpful.

As for my allegation of terrible results. I think it mainly comes down to low quality sites being prioritized. I didn't want to make up search queries, so I decided to just go through my history to find my searches on Brave and compare the results with DDG.

"scientology speedrun instagram"

Brave returns mostly news articles in the main results and only a specific Instagram reel. Brave has an area for videos which is particularly relevant, but DDG has a carousel thing for news. DDG returns an Instagram and Tiktok area for the topic and an X account. Then Wikipedia and Knowyourmeme.

I would say DDG actually wins here because it is very much more on topic with the social media sites being resulted (X, IG, TikTok), but the results feel less clickable to me because those social media sites are so unfriendly to adblocking, VPN using, not-signed-in users.

"fisa news"

Brave shows a really nice variety of specific news article updates as well as primary sources like a .gov. DDG does similarly, but it's really only news and it is really a smattering of different mainstream news websites. That's fine, but then there's also that carosel which is 100% filled with Yahoo and Foxnews, which I consider both to be low-quality.

Another big problem with DDG in this specific search is there are quite a few simple links to news website's tag on fisa, which isn't helpful to me.

I'm not the happiest about either results, but Brave wins because of the lack of slop from yahoo as well as the primary source results.

who is the highest level scientologist who left

Neither DDG nor Brave returns any immediate actual answers in websites, but by automatically returning the AI summary, I get a satisfying answer from Brave's AI.

"sovereignty"

I was surprised, but DDG totally wins this one. Brave doesn't have that built in dictionary result, DDG does. Brave also has a news carosel which is not relevant. Pretty comparable with the other results, but definitely a win for DDG.

Actually, what's the deal with putting the "search assist" at the bottom. That's pretty weird.

I think a lot of my bias against DDG comes from the UI. Brave seems friendlier, rounder, easier to read.

Hopefully this helps.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#229

Post by WarmWash »

aleqs wrote: post #207
WarmWash wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Users do not compensate websites for serving ads. Are you confused or being sarcastic? I'll admit the system is one step larger than a typical transaction, which could be hard to understand for some, but the views -> ads -> dollars pipeline is the still straightforward to understand. Maybe not. I don't know when things get too complicated here.

Do you understand the difference between a user compensating someone directly vs an ad agency or platform doing so? Or do you think users actually think 'i don't want this creator to be compensated so I'll use an ad blocker'? Let me know which part is so confusing/complicated for you.

>Do you understand the difference between a user compensating someone directly vs an ad agency or platform doing so?

No, I don't. From a business perspective its all the same revenue line item. However it does determine who I am working for.

>Or do you think users actually think 'i don't want this creator to be compensated so I'll use an ad blocker'?

I don't think they are thinking at all, besides "Wow this is cool I can bypass ads!". But I can tell you, from the creator side, it's a massive problem. 30-40% of your customers have this idea that your time has no value (and ~99% if you go the donation route, 90-95% if you paywall)

Also keep in mind, any creator can give away their work for free, but they don't. I don't think it's controversial at all to say that's intentional.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#230

Post by WarmWash »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #198
WarmWash wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Users do not compensate websites for serving ads. Are you confused or being sarcastic? I'll admit the system is one step larger than a typical transaction, which could be hard to understand for some, but the views -> ads -> dollars pipeline is the still straightforward to understand. Maybe not. I don't know when things get too complicated here.

I think a lot of us object to the opacity and scale of it all. These aren’t simply commercials running like OTA tv in the days of old. They are basically fracking our data and then selling it to other people without any oversight or ability to stop it. You are basically under assault from the moment you walk through the metaphorical door. Why does a host need my device info, my demographics, every app I’m on, my rout…

No, my actual framing is that people don't want to pay for what they use, and ad-block created this generational illusion that you can have things of value made by others for free, and it's a good thing.

The system would topple rapidly if people went back to paying directly.

But there is a huge caveat. The ad internet created a classless egalitarian internet where everyone can pay with attention, rather than money. Almost everyone has equal attention, not everyone has equal money. This is taken for granted, but it's very real.

A payment based internet, devoid of ads and tracking, would be back to the rich people having all the coolest services.

But nowhere in any scenario is "free riders counting on suckers to cover their costs".

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