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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

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Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#271

Post by gU9x3u8XmQNG »

reddalo wrote: post #213
samdung wrote: post #165

The internet is an SEO landfill ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 ) This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.

We need to collectively stop using Google, but the alternatives are just not as good for some things. The best one is probably Kagi, but let's be real: "normal" people would never pay for a search engine service. Well, "normal" people don't even know the difference between Google, Google Chrome and probably the internet.

I’d love to go full Kagi. I feel the family pricing, as a new user, is just a little too high for me.

A family of four, two kids and two adults; 20 dollars ex GST (excluding tax) is.. gosh.

With the cost of living growing so quickly.. It’s quite a defeating experience.

So in conclusion; I expand your criteria above. Even “not-normal” people may not pay for a search engine, though for financial reasons in my case.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#272

Post by fauigerzigerk »

bruce511 wrote: post #144
Dylan16807 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you elaborate on what the value of the site might be, to say a competitive advertiser, Lots of ads don't care very much what site they are on, even if the purpose of the site is somehow unknowable. But google knows the traffic it sends there. And it's able to show ads alongside those search results. Why can't it put similar ads on the page? And apparently adding the dumb text unlocked ads, so there's the value…

I think that if you had 5 advertising networks, they'd all operate the same. I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view. I think if there were 5 advertising aggregators they'd say the same. You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table, not just for this site, but a lot of others like it. I'm suggesting that if this category of site had value to an advertis…

>I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view [...] You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table

What makes you say these things? Google isn't walking away from a deal here. They are simply imposing their own rules knowing that the publisher has very little choice but to comply. Google probably knows that the enshitified version of the site makes them more money, but that doesn't mean a cleaner site has no value. It's just not maximising advertising income at the cost of user experience.

If there were several ad networks competing for this kind of business then each of them would have less power to impose their rules. Their margins would be far lower. Advertisers would pay less and/or sites would be making more money. And sites might have a choice to prioritise user experience over maximising ad revenue.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#273

Post by ohcmon »

turtles3 wrote: post #242
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

Honestly I think Google needs to be broken up. It's not a novel idea but the more I think about it the more I like it. So, Google becomes two orgs: Google indexing and Google search. Google indexing must offer its services to all search providers equally without preference to Google search. Now we can have competition in results ranking and monetisation, while 'google indexing' must compete on providing the most valu…

I’m afraid the problem is not indexing, but monetization. Alternative google search will not be profitable (especially if you have to pay a share to google indexing) because no one will buy ads there - even for bing it is a challenge

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#275

Post by detourdog »

smetj wrote: post #216
isodev wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, webrings?

Yes.

The scale of the internet is too large for individual consumption search engines and word of mouth are the methods I see for distributing access. Search engines need individual Judgement to evaluate results and word of mouth provides context clues and trust.

Business prefers search engines to scale their monetization efforts but the quality of results are unknown.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#276

Post by IshKebab »

ant6n wrote: post #174
IshKebab wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get why people have problems using Google for recipes anyway. Just search for recipes on BBC good food. They have recipes for everything, lots of ratings from real people; the highly rated recipes are really good. Here's an example: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/strawberry-cheesecake-4-... I've literally never needed another recipe site.

We need search engines because not everyone knows every good website for every possible context.

Sure, but in this specific context there's just one website you need to know. It's like you don't need a search engine to find IMDb or Wikipedia.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#277

Post by elorant »

allendoerfer wrote: post #274
elorant wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said they're spammers?

You did. In your above post.

A SEO company represents a plastic surgeon. They offer money to a news site to publish an advertorial. How's that spam? And that article about how to properly wash your clothes that suggests a few washing machines is also paid. That's how news media works for ages. So by your definition all these legitimate companies are spammers? Would you care to inform me how should PR be performed then?

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#278

Post by hamilyon2 »

geraldwhen wrote: post #262
zrobotics wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it a Landfill seems accurate. I just searched (on DDG) for the tap size for a 5/16-24 bolt. I got garbage like this: https://shuntool.com/article/what-size-drill-os-used-for-a-5... This isn't even the worst example, since it does at least have the correct info buried amongst tons of Ai generated garbage, but I can't use this for reference, since it tells me 4 different drill sizes. I've had to switch back to…

I find myself using yandex more and more. They’re like old Google, but obviously based in Russia. https://www.americanfastener.com/tap-and-drill-size-chart/ That was the first result.

Unfortunately, yandex is destined to fade into irrelevance for the reasons that has nothing to do with the tech.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#279

Post by speleding »

zrobotics wrote: post #167
samdung wrote: post #165

The internet is an SEO landfill ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 ) This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.

Calling it a Landfill seems accurate. I just searched (on DDG) for the tap size for a 5/16-24 bolt. I got garbage like this: https://shuntool.com/article/what-size-drill-os-used-for-a-5... This isn't even the worst example, since it does at least have the correct info buried amongst tons of Ai generated garbage, but I can't use this for reference, since it tells me 4 different drill sizes. I've had to switch back to…

For queries like that I now turn to Gemini / ChatGPT first. Of course, this is only a good idea if I have some way of sanity checking the answer. If I doubt the answer I get back I try Google search instead.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#280

Post by steve1977 »

wickedsight wrote: post #197

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

To be fair, it’s not Google who is gatekeeping the Internet, but the “dumb masses” who are using Google.

Google is just gatekeeping Google.

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