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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)

#441

Post by cess11 »

elorant wrote: post #384
cess11 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean, "legitimate companies"? You seem to have misunderstood the difference between an advertising agency and a SEO company. What you're describing is what advertising agencies do, SEO companies are spammers that sell access to their spamming tools. It's similar to the difference between an agency practicing law and having them send a cease-and-desist, and buying a DDoS. Not that I'm particularly fond of…

A plastic surgeon is a legitimate business. How on earth would a business like that promote its site and gain visitors? By paying exuberant fees on keyword auctions on AdWords? It's way more affordable to just pay a PR firm, or a SEO company to publish an advertorial on a news site. And no, not all companies that sell SEO are spammers. Grow up, please. Some of you guys need to get your heads out of your butts and rea…

Personally I don't think for-profit surgery, or for-profit medicine generally, is a legitimate business. It might open up as a possibility when every person has access to the medical care they need, but that seems far off.

Email spam is cheaper than news paper adverts, does that make it "legitimate"? Because that seems to be your argument here.

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

#442

Post by math_dandy »

wyldfire wrote: post #419
sharpshadow wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Investigating and prosecuting anticompetitive behavior simply takes to long to investigate and prosecute. And by the time this happens, the fast-moving nature of the tech industry usually means the issue is not nearly as relevant as it was when the issue arose. Then the company strikes a mea-culpa deal with the appropriate governing body and makes changes that don't actually matter any more.

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

#444

Post by cma »

layer8 wrote: post #387
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.

Have you tried verbatim mode? I use it by default.

Google used to work closer to verbatim mode but would get common synonyms to give you comprehensive results. Now it stretches synonyms and alternate spellings to the point of uselessness.

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

#445

Post by ganzuul »

zulban wrote: post #26
rustcleaner wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public). Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsof…

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.

If the value of "GDP of all African countries" is a numerical value then it is simplistic. If the value is informed by the functions which result in such numbers then it is perhaps too complicated.

If the parent has lots of experience with African economies then the value might be a distillation of the latter complicated ensemble of functions into something very meaningful.

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

#446

Post by notyourwork »

amarcheschi wrote: post #426
ibic wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

DuckDuckGo works great in my experience as of late.

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

#447

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

dsq wrote: post #436
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…

Did you any problem building a site on a proprietary subject like Nurburgring? Its private. Dont they have copyright, etc. Did you get an agreememt with them or is it not an issue in Germany?

Are you for real? Honest question.

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

#448

Post by Nifty3929 »

We have in some respects done this to ourselves. We've created a funding model such that watching ads is the primary way we pay for the content and services that we consume. Then, our desire for privacy causes us to restrict the data that websites can collect about us, leading to less targeted and therefore less valuable ads.

So now we have to watch ever more ads which are ever less valuable.

For me, I'd rather that companies had better tracking and could therefore show me fewer, more personally relevant ads. And maybe some strong laws that prevent them from sharing my data with the government.

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

#449

Post by withinboredom »

kqr wrote: post #405
withinboredom wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

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

While a useful metric, it's an unknowable metric.

1. You have no idea if the user even knows what they are looking for, so how would you know that they found it?

2. You have no idea if the user found what they are looking for, maybe what they are looking for isn't on the internet?

3. You have no idea if the user is even looking for something, maybe it was just a cat running across the keyboard?

The only way to learn the answer is to have humans talk to humans. You can't game your way through it by using metrics.

It reminds me of this one time the CEO asked our team to add a metric for "successful websites" (we were a hosting provider) and we rebuffed with "define successful." They immediately mentioned page views, which we replied "what about a restaurant with a downloadable menu that google links to directly?" and back and forth with "successful" never being defined for all verticals and all cases. It just isn't possible to define using heuristics.

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

#450

Post by madcoderme »

gregw134 wrote: post #185
madcoderme wrote: post #157

> I looked into a half-dozen or so alternatives, but all the other companies were either simply Google ads re-sellers, which is an ecosystem I don't quite understand, or were extremely sketchy, and had reviews complaining about how they trick people into downloading malware and such. This is so true. I have tried to monetize my tools with ads quite a few times before, and the only way was to use Adsense. It's actuall…

Doesn't Microsoft have an ad network?

Yes, but not as distributed as adsense
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