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

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

#411

Post by bruce511 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:03 PM UTC

bitnasty wrote: post #315

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…

If he’s getting paid per impression, then I don’t see how the payout will be unexpected terrible considering the site has existing traffic. Of course he could be paid by click, in which case you are probably right.

Does Adsense pay for impressions? Legit question, I have no idea... I imagine $-per-impression would be impressively low... Isn't $-per-click pretty low anyway?

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

#412

Post by carlosjobim » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:04 PM UTC

neocritter wrote: post #373

carlosjobim wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet. They really don't. People reach enormous audiences thorough social media.

It's been a long time since I thought about any of this, but last time I did, social media traffic was some of the worst quality. Search traffic was seen as golden because it came with intent. Social media traffic was wandering and aimless, so converted poorly even if it was 1000x search. Search still got more conversions and it was no contest. Did something change?

Commercially I agree with you, search traffic is much better than social media traffic.

But people are reaching huge audiences through social media without even having any domain that can be indexed by Google. That is also the world wide web.

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

#413

Post by don_esteban » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:05 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.

Does it need to? How large does it needs to be? Can it be treated as 'essential infrastructure'?

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

#414

Post by jacobsimon » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:12 PM UTC

croes wrote: post #407

jacobsimon wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not saying that’s what happened here, but if people are searching for “images of X” and you remove your image of X, how is that Google’s fault?

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

#415

Post by Kalium » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:13 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #397

Kalium wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask an email administrator how well decentralization works at scale. It should be concerning that email has re-centralized to deal with all the problems that come from federation and decentralization.

Mail servers aren't real people or real businesses. 50 year old decentralized protocol has problems, so decentralized protocols can't possible work. Just like 50 year old computer can't play doom, so doom doesn't exist.

Search systems aren't real people or real businesses either. Never mind details like how you define and enforce "real" in a decentralized way across N legal systems with wildly varying ideas of what it means to be a "legitimate" business. There is no system or ledger you can query to find out if a given person is real or a business is legitimate. This is exceptionally unlikely to change on a useful timescale.

The basic problem with email is that it assumed good-faith participation from the parties involved. It was assumed that only legitimate actors would have the resources to participate and they would always be well-behaved. This, it turns out, was flawed on several counts. For one, it assumed legitimacy could be assured. For another, it assumed legitimate users would be well-behaved and would never abuse services for gain. For a third, it assumed account takeovers or other impersonation attacks wouldn't happen.

Every de-centralized system that aspires to not have email's problems needs to take them seriously.

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

#416

Post by dools » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:15 PM UTC

VelesDude wrote: post #285

dools wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think market cap is the right signal, but vertical integration. The worst monopolistic behaviour almost always involves one company controlling multiple parts of a supply chain. That's obviously why vertical integration is so popular!

This was something that was always seen as inspiration in Apple, while they were small. Once a company of that nature gets to a certain size, it becomes far to powerful as any movement in the core business, intentional or otherwise, can influence multiple industries simultaneously. This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to l…

Yeah, so I think that the issue isn't that Apple does several things well, it's that they do something well and then only consume that product themselves.

To an extent every business must generalise and specialise in various configurations as they get going and differentiate themselves, but at the point where Apple is building its own silicon which it then puts in its own hardware on which you can install software from their app store, regulators should be able to clearly say "if you're going to make chips, you have to let other people buy them too" and "if you're going to have an app store you have to let other people have an app store too" and so on.

That's not feasible for a very small business, but it's not as if you can apply a "market cap" point at which it becomes feasible. You can however pretty easily tell when a company has a "wholesale" division and a "retail" division and is essentially selling to themselves in the same way as another company might sell to them. It's always challenging codifying that stuff into law but we have a pretty long history of doing so, I don't think it would be an insurmountable regulatory challenge.

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

#417

Post by p3rls » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:18 PM UTC

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…

Even with the latest update blogspam from India still dominates my niche. Welcome to the internet of the 2020s where investing in your product means jackshit because wordpress idiots can press a button and yoast an article.

If you're a creator-type why on earth would you ever build a web product in this type of environment? Join a corp or create trash and ride the wave -- at least then you'll have some semblance of a normal life instead of a living like a starving artist into your 30s

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

#418

Post by throwaway743 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:21 PM UTC

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #302

mft_ wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try using kagi. The results are so much better.

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

#419

Post by wyldfire » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:23 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.

If this were really the case, wouldn't it be a painfully obvious anticompetitive move?

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

#420

Post by dazc » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 2:24 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.

I have never found search console useful for anything other than random 404's and one-off server errors. When a site is hit by an algorithmic penalty there is never any clue as to why.