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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)

#421

Post by dazc »

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 true then every site would implement adsense. Most don't.

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

#422

Post by orangevelcro »

mrweasel wrote: post #403
rendall wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

I can't believe how terrible product search is on Instacart - I place orders on there pretty frequently for my mom, and Petco is the worst.

I will search for "wellness chicken cat food" - and wellness has chicken cat food in a few different textures, so it seems like those should at least be on the page of search results, if not the top results. Not always so! At the very least I will have to scroll a ways down the page to get anything even wellness.

And sometimes the top results aren't even cat food, they will be random other pet supplies.

Or she wants a few different flavors of the food, and I find one and then the other flavors I have to search a few different ways to pull them up and they don't show up on any "similar" displays.

It's painful. I hope Google doesn't go the same way - I think with Instacart it's because they want to promote whatever it is they put at the top, but even that doesn't explain how terrible some of the search results are.

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

#423

Post by dazc »

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 should refuse for the simple fact that this company is unlikely to be only contacting you. They will have a large footprint that you don't want to be part of.

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

#424

Post by nsagent »

ynniv wrote: post #341
rendall wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

PageRank isn't working well anymore. I use DDG, but it its quality is also flagging.

Yeah, DDG quality seems abysmal for many of my searches now. I'll then switch to Brave, which sometimes finds what I'm looking for. I rarely ever check Google or Bing as a fallback, but when I do it feels like a screenful of ads and it isn't any more helpful (except Google Image search).

Part of the problem seems like a recency bias in search results. I notice sites frequently update pages with new timestamps, but nothing of substance appears to have changed (e.g. a review of something that was released 4 years ago, but the page was supposedly updated last week). So if I do pretty much the same search that succeeded two months ago, but repeat it today, I might not find the useful result I remember coming across.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other issues related to search and SEO that are affecting search quality. It seems insane that the major search providers don't combat this trend by arming users with more tools to tailor their search, but rather steadily degrade the user experience with no recourse.

Honestly, I think if Google was wise, they'd have a skunkworks team rethinking search from scratch (not tied to AI/LLMs) that starts their own index and tries to come up with an alternative to the current Google Search. Maybe they have that already, though I doubt it. I'm sure if they do have such a team, it's intricately tied to existing infrastructure and team hierarchies which effectively nullifies any chance it has at success.

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

#425

Post by CuriouslyC »

chasd00 wrote: post #399
CuriouslyC wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask a model to provided an analysis of its answer including a probability that it is correct as part of the prompt, helps with doublechecking a lot.

You’re right back at square one hoping you can trust the analysis is correct.

No, you absolutely are not. It's like an extra bit of parity, so you have more information than before.

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

#426

Post by amarcheschi »

ibic wrote: post #394
sharpshadow wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This reminds of "Bidding Rank" from Baidu decades ago (and I think it pretty much still applies for Baidu) - Google was not only better technologically, but ethically because their search results were not that profit driven as "Bidding Rank" which was (and still is) very much despised. Now it seems Google only cares about profit and started to do things more or less the same way. Sick. Disclosure - I was so pissed by…

What's the search engine?

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

#427

Post by croes »

jacobsimon wrote: post #414
croes wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Google's USP once was not falling for content farms and their word lists.

Are we back to the early days of search engines?

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

#428

Post by rustcleaner »

jorvi wrote: post #369
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…

> 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. These are solved by being transparent and surfacing the agent (maybe even the sub-agents) for ranking, and allowing us to choose. This way, if someone/something is gaming the system, I can just say "this recommender is garbage"…

Freenet FMS; more specifically: Web of Trust.

IMO it's how all moderation should go: you subscribe to some default moderators' lists initially and then mutate those subscriptions and their trust levels. Mod actions are simply adding visibility options to content and not actually removing anything.

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

#429

Post by pembrook »

shotnothing wrote: post #304
pembrook wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then you quietly change the rule, and get years of success until it's widely gamed again.

The point is, there's experimentation that could be done and there's absolutely solutions that could be found.

Early Google did tons of experimentation with the search algorithm to maintain the integrity of the results. There was definitely an active game of cat and mouse back then that Google actually cared about staying on top of.

But as a decades entrenched monopoly, Google lost all incentives to tinker with anything anymore. The "operational" folks took over and any change to the search algorithm is now a multi-year endeavor involving thousands of stakeholders.

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

#430

Post by fauigerzigerk »

bruce511 wrote: post #395
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having only one ad network means that the monopolist holds all the cards. They can extract huge margins from advertisers while passing on very little to websites. And they can make all the rules. Websites have to comply no questions asked. If the monopolist closes your account it may be the end of the road for your business. That said, Google is not actually a monopolist in online advertising. There's also Facebook,…

All the risks of basing your income on a single supplier are true. But that's not the real complaint here. The real complaint is that Google did not consider the original site to be "ad supplier worthy". As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?

>The real complaint is that Google did not consider the original site to be "ad supplier worthy".

No, that was not the complaint. The complaint is that Google demanded changes that made the site worse for users. These changes are clearly meant to optimise ad revenue.

Google is in a position of power that allows them to make these demands. More competition between ad networks would reduce the power of each individual ad network and give publishers more negotiating power.

>As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?

As I understand it, no other ad networks have even seen the site. Amazon and Facebook are clearly unsuitable. Microsoft may have been worth a shot. For this type of site I think Google has a nearly complete monopoly.

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