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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)

#481

Post by EchoReflection »

"anticapitalist" complains about a capitalist company doing something that capitalist companies are obligated to do because their purpose is to serve their shareholders, not cater to every unique situation of every person that uses the Internet. "I want my website to show Google's advertisements and give me money, but if Google is going to make it difficult for me then I want to complain about it!" excuse me while I rub my thumb and index (haha, search engine play on words!) together to play a sad tune on the world's smallest violin. billions of websites work fine without having anything to do with soulless Google.

https://snigel.com/blog/top-adsense-alternatives

positive outlooks work better than negative ones, and embracing challenges with vigor rather than a sense of "injustice! here I am nailed upon a cross!" is the way to have a more spiritually rewarding life, imo.

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

#482

Post by pelario »

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…

How about Wikipedia's approach?

Of course Wikipedia is way smaller than the internet, but still one way to go could be by having themed "human curated niches"

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

#484

Post by CuriouslyC »

sehro wrote: post #454
CuriouslyC wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're consistent to the model, particularly if you ask the model to rationalize its rating. You will get plenty of hallucinated answers that the model can recognize as hallucinations and give a low rating to in the same response.

If the model can properly and consistently recognize hallucinations, why does it return said hallucinations in the first place?

Models can get caught by what they start to say early. So if they model goes down a path that seems like a likely answer early on, and that ends up being a false lead or dead end, they will end up making up something plausible sounding to try and finish that line of thought even if it's wrong. This is why chain of thought and other "pre-answer" techniques improve results.

Because of the way transformers work, they have very good hindsight, so they can realize that they've just said things that are incorrect much more often than they can avoid saying incorrect things.

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

#485

Post by EasyMark »

bruce511 wrote: post #44
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…

How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site? You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?

The point is that if google ads were busted up into more corporations it would be more competitive and there would be other ad companies that would offer superior options.

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

#486

Post by EasyMark »

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?

Their point is that if there were more ad companies then the chance they would have allowed the site to go up as the original. Not to 100% of course but drastically higher than 0%

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

#487

Post by EasyMark »

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.

That's why compromise happens. It's clearly superior to "let this company grow to an unlimited size, have all the power in the market, and tell customers to go pound sand because we're too big to fail". It would be a great start to set a cap or market percentage (assuming the market is huge, which obviously online marketing is).

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

#488

Post by dotancohen »

jacobsimon wrote: post #459
dotancohen wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience as well. If someone could mention how to examine the console to improve a site after an algo change, I would absolutely love to hear it .

I also find it mystifying and I’m not a SEO expert, but one way I use it is to compare ranking positions over time for specific pages and queries. That will help you identify where exactly the traffic came from and where you lost it. A lot of times this has to do with gaining or losing the #1 spot to a competitor. If you don’t see a ranking change, it could also indicate seasonality in your visitors or external event…

Very helpful, thank you.

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

#489

Post by rendall »

orangevelcro wrote: post #422
mrweasel wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I just think wellness aside you should get other food than cat food for your mom.

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

#490

Post by freeopinion »

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.

I agree with your general point that it should not be the responsibility of the website to change to make a search engine happy.

I disagree with your specific point that Google should fix anything. Google can choose their own behaviors and motivations. Users can choose to rely on Google or trust them at all, or not.

Remember when Google was a successful business competing against the likes of Yahoo and AltaVista? Back when it was ok to be a successful small business? When you didn't count a millions users as a failure?

Nobody seems to believe anymore that you can operate a successful search company without having a trillion dollar war chest. Few people are willing to give alternative engines a try. They'd rather stick to Google like glue.

I'd like to declare the 28th as "Try something different day." On the 28th of each month people should try a different browser for the entire day. Or a different search engine. Or a different tooth paste. Every month, one day a month, take a different route to work, or maybe even a different mode of transportation. Use a Colemak keyboard. Go to a different church. You don't have to do the same different thing each month. Just start building some experience with shaking up your routine.

When you try something different and it turns out ok, share your positive experience with others.

I have not used Google search or Bing for years and it has worked out pretty well. I started with DDG, but have had good experiences with other search engines, too. Some may argue that DDG is not different enough. So perhaps next month I should try qwant.com for a day.

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