Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023) • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by marginalia_nu » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 1:55 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #371

pixl97 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know why you don't see systems like this at any scale Because they don't work.

Decentralized communication absolutely works, and we have plenty of decentralized tools now. Decentralized search is a legitimately hard problem, both because it needs strong protocols (which are getting there but still WIP) and user adoption (which isn't really happening).

Decentralized communications may work, but decentralized internet search is probably always going to be impractical.

The actual logic involved in search is itself pretty simple and almost trivial to shard, the problem is dealing with a mutable dataset that is of the order of a hundred terabytes.

Search gets enormous benefits from data locality, such that distributed approaches are all significantly more expensive.

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

#402

Post by bruce511 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

a_dabbler wrote: post #161

bruce511 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, theres only one option. But let's imagine you're CEO of option 2. What do you think you might do differently which would make this site, in its original form, appealing to advertise on? Having multiple ad companies doesn't sound like an improvement when the advertising space on offer doesn't seem to be good for advertising. Or to put it another way, do you feel this space does have value, but Google is leaving th…

The new unneeded content doesn't make the site more appealing to advertise on, instead it exists purely to satisfy arbitrary standards set by Adsense. I feel you've missed the point of the article

I get it. The unnecessary content games the Adsense algorithm, convincing it that the site now has value as a "place for adverts".

That, in itself, is not actually a win. There would need to be traffic, clicks on ads, and so on to be a win.

There's no evidence (either way, it's simply not mentioned) if the site actually makes any revenue from the ads that are now on it. Perhaps the automated Adsense algorithm was correct "the original site isn't a good ad site" - and the mistake is that it can't see what "seems" to be true to us, which is that the new site is no better.

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

#403

Post by mrweasel » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

rendall wrote: post #330

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm curious. Why do you use Google if you don't like their results?

Personally I have one use case left for Google: Product Search.

If I'm looking to buy something, I will frequently end up using Google. The engine that matches my product search to a relevant ad is excellent. Basically anytime you need to search for something that could lead to a purchase of a physical product, Google will be extremely useful. For services and software you can't use Google, you will get hustled by fake review or top 10 XYZ for 2024 sites.

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

#404

Post by perlgeek » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 1:59 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #391

perlgeek wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How might you see solving this problem? Break up google, disentangle AdSense from Search. Then the search division doesn't have incentives anymore to prioritize websites based on AdSense presence.

How would the search division make money? Serious question.

Search can still serve ads on their own pages (which Google calls "AdWords"), and (iirc) makes the most revenue for Google.

AdSense is serving ads on third-party websites, which is very different.

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

#405

Post by kqr » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:00 PM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #301

kqr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why do you care as a search engine?

Wait, are you really asking why a search engine would care how well it finds what the user is looking for?

Granted, there are a lot of search engines that sell themselves on other metrics ("it's fast!" or "it uses AI!" or "it's in the cloud!") but any serious search engine player strives to learn how good it is -- in practise -- at helping the user find what they are looking for. That's ultimately the purpose of a search engine.

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

#406

Post by sct202 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

sharpshadow wrote: post #348

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…

Google be like: this website performs well on the ranking, does it have AdSense, no, downrank.

OP's website is heavy with affiliate link listicles, which have been recently heavily downranked in favor of forums and content like Reddit and Quora.

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

#407

Post by croes » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

jacobsimon wrote: post #380

sharpshadow wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google be like: this website performs well on the ranking, does it have AdSense, no, downrank.

To the parent commenter - have you set up google search console and reviewed what pages and keywords were affected? There could be other reasons why your pages aren't being indexed properly. If it's a small site, it could have been something as simple as changing an image or page title.

If something simple removes a useful site from the search results Google should fix its algorithm not the otheway around.

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

#408

Post by bruce511 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #326

bruce511 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I agree it's still a crappy site for advertising. He gamed the algorithm to get onto the program. Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid. On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views. I have a road pas…

> a few cars a day That's not a fair analogy because the article describes the site like this: > For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic. Sure, we could do with more specific info, but it sounds very far from "a few cars a day" to me.

It's really hard to know what a "steady stream" is without useful quantification. I mean to you or me a steady stream might be 100 people a day. Or a million. It's hard to say. (And clearly that would be useful knowledge in the context of evaluating the value of the site.)

On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.

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

#409

Post by layer8 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

elorant wrote: post #255

jwr wrote: post #227

This situation is made even worse by us. Yes, us. Inbound links used to be a good quality signal: the more people link to you, the more important your site is. And there were always link farms and SEO lowlives that abused the system. But these days it is nearly impossible to get any legitimate inbound links, because people don't have web pages and web sites anymore, instead entering all the information into silos lik…

So if I have a content site and some SEO company offers me money to publish an article am I supposed to refuse for the well being of Google’s SERP?

You refuse because visibility of an article shouldn’t be based on who can pay the most money to push its visibility.

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

#410

Post by mrweasel » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:03 PM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #352

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?

> How might you see solving this problem? Break up google, disentangle AdSense from Search. Then the search division doesn't have incentives anymore to prioritize websites based on AdSense presence.

I don't think that's necessarily required. Google has always done well, even without pushing ads as hard as they are now. The problem is that Google / Alphabet has become to reliant to the money from ads to finance other non-/less profitable products.

We've seen Google sell a profitable business, Google Domains, because it didn't make enough money for Google to bother with. For some reason Google believes that it is entitled to make some insane profit, rather than being content with having a reasonably profitable ad supported search business.

Google Search sucks because of the current financial model they, and most of society works under.