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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)

#301

Post by withinboredom »

kqr wrote: post #181
throwup238 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once…

Yup. This is the Long Click metric. Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for? If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up? The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for…

> if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for?

Why do you care as a search engine? This is a natural human problem that can't be solved with technology, only by humans.

It used to be, that I went to page 5 of Google instantly, because that was where the real results were. The first few pages were people who knew more SEO than sense.

These days, that doesn't work since "semantic search" because now it appears to be sorted by some relevance metric and by about page 5 you start getting into "marginally related to some definition of what you typed in but still knows too much SEO to be useful."

The point is, this was already a solved problem if you knew to go to about page 4-5. Then people started trying to use a technical solution to a very human problem.

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

#302

Post by itopaloglu83 »

mft_ wrote: post #226
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?

I've been through this thought-process many times. 1. Google isn't working well any more. 2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages. 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload. 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive. 5. Forget it. --- Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoeve…

> 1. Google isn't working well any more.

This is so true. It’s pain to search for anything undeterministic with nowadays. I usually find myself putting double quotes on every single word I’m interested in and Google still brings unrelated results.

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

#303

Post by bitnasty »

sumedh wrote: post #90
zulban wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary. Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.

> When you set an arbitrary cap You can join the US military at 17, why this arbitrary number, why not 16, why not 20?

That’s not what arbitrary means. The age is set as low as possible while still being reasonable as to not send kids to war. Maybe the distinction between the ages 16-17 and 17-18 seems “arbitrary” but there is a reason the age is 17 and not 71. Hence, not arbitrary.

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

#304

Post by shotnothing »

pembrook wrote: post #257
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?

You’re writing this comment on a site with an upvote/downvote based algorithm. The answer is simple, allow some level of user feedback from proven real users (for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret) and apply it mildly as a ranking signal. As long as it doesn’t become the only factor in ranking, you…

> for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret

tbh this is just a bandage, its just going to get botted once people discover the pattern (a lot of premium bot farms do offer mature or hacked gmail accounts anyway) and its going to be worse for legitimate discovery

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

#305

Post by kubanczyk »

withinboredom wrote: post #297
Galanwe wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the solution to this is both unique and trivial: you cannot trust something that is freely expandable,or did not require some amount of stake from the other party. That stake can be anything, time, work or money. If you want to trust a review, it's needs to have required a non expandable resource from the reviewer. That amount of resource should be an optimum of what an average user would be willing to expand…

> That stake can be anything, time, work or money. I think you'll find that money should be removed from your list. There are some untrustworthy people that have tons of money. Sadly, I think trust must be EARNED, and that requires giving effort (work) and time. You cannot buy trust with simple money.

Then web of trust. Means SSO (as a way to link the review to the trust).

In order to prevent hacking trust the SSO again must ensure:

- unique human, or

- resource spend

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

#306

Post by sambazi »

withinboredom wrote: post #297
Galanwe wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the solution to this is both unique and trivial: you cannot trust something that is freely expandable,or did not require some amount of stake from the other party. That stake can be anything, time, work or money. If you want to trust a review, it's needs to have required a non expandable resource from the reviewer. That amount of resource should be an optimum of what an average user would be willing to expand…

> That stake can be anything, time, work or money. I think you'll find that money should be removed from your list. There are some untrustworthy people that have tons of money. Sadly, I think trust must be EARNED, and that requires giving effort (work) and time. You cannot buy trust with simple money.

> You cannot buy trust with simple money.

yet rich ppl are granted more upfront trust. maybe because we assume less incentive to rob.

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

#307

Post by HPsquared »

FullstakBlogger wrote: post #300
hosteur wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you build a community if google prevents users from finding it?

The existence of meatspace never stopped the early web from flourishing, so why should the existence of the modern web stop anybody from making a second web? The only reason that Google was useful is because it tapped into the trust network that already existed before it. I feel like the social media churn has destroyed people's brains, because they're more interested in stopping people from doing things they don't l…

That's exactly it, the people are different now. They don't have the same time or energy as before.

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

#308

Post by sambazi »

hosteur wrote: post #281
elorant wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was already solved in the past. Don’t just build a web site, build a community. This way the community will advertise the site and attract more users.

How do you build a community if google prevents users from finding it?

it's not really a community if it relies on an influx of random strangers

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

#309

Post by pineaux »

steve1977 wrote: post #280
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.

Do you have a god alternative? I am interested.

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

#310

Post by bitnasty »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #150
bruce511 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites. Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising. Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they se…

> Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." 1) Advertisers - plural? What other advertisers is Google referencing? In this context, 'advertisers' means all the other meaningfully similar ad options that the author could choose from. 2) This wording: "The team has reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time." is Google's clear and blatant refusal to ext…

Advertisers are the ones paying to have their ads shown. Google is not an advertiser in this context.
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