491–500 of 551 posts
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I don’t know, webrings?
Webrings were a lot of people doing work for free or with little return. Nobody has time to do this anymore, and the only way to support such project would be paid membership (hard to gain traction) or ads (back to square one). Sorry that I sound pessimistic but I just am.
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> Nobody has time to do this anymore Can you say more about that?
Thank you for the question. It really needs an explanation. Times have changed. While there are significantly more open-source projects, online communities, and all kinds of available help than ever before, the proportion of active contributors relative to the number of people online has decreased. Consequently, the time required for each volunteer to process input for a project like a "webring" has increased signifi…
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Yes.
The scale of the internet is too large for individual consumption search engines and word of mouth are the methods I see for distributing access. Search engines need individual Judgement to evaluate results and word of mouth provides context clues and trust. Business prefers search engines to scale their monetization efforts but the quality of results are unknown.
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Hmmm. First one I clicked from their home page: https://www.taste.com.au/baking/galleries/autumn-cakes/p6d5x... > When the weather starts to finally cool down and the evenings ... Just No.
That's not a recipe, it's a short intro to a list of recipes. Just Learn To Read.
That's exactly the point. It doesn't need to be there, doesn't add any value whatsoever, etc. ;)
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If a simple useful site already gets a high percentage of clicks from Google Searches for its functionality, and wants to show ads, that’s $. Right? Why would PageRank rate a site highly, and funnnel people to it, while Adsense doesn’t want to monetize it? I can’t come up with a sensible reason. All I can think is Adsense is becoming so gamey, so sophisticated at monetizing spam and low quality content, that they are…
You’re ignoring the part about numbers of visitors and the lack of actual numbers. While the author may feel they are decent, Googs may think they are not.
What does not enough traffic mean? As a measure? As a rationale? What threshold was not achieved here that makes actual sense?
High quality links to pages with Google ads are all Google should care about at its most self-interested. There is no “too small” because it is all incremental. Why send someone somewhere and not have an ad there?
If they got more traffic due to the intentional crap additions, what does that tell you about Google Search?
This is an example of full failure of Google to even take care of their own interests.
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Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers? My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent). Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
>> Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers? No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system. >> Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly. Improvement in this case I assume meaning "identifying the site gamed the rules". I suspect, but don't know, that Google spends a lot on trying to identify site quality. But the ones buildin…
Everything you say here is true, yet misses the point.
Google search results are dominated by sites just like the one presented. This is something one no one likes - not the people doing the searches, nor the people doing the advertising and definitely (as this post shows) not the people creating the sites. They would much prefer just to put up their content without spending hours on creating LLM SEO spam. I'm sure Google is worried if they don't do better someone will they will lose relevance.
Inquiring minds what to know how we ended up here. The article provides just that. It explains how the incentives Google have put in place drove him to producing one of those sites. He wanted that ad revenue and he wanted search results to find his site and the only way he could find to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on generating content he had no personal interest in was to pollute it with LLM spam.
You are criticising him for that, yet most web sites returned by Google all make that same choice. I guess according to you most of the web is acting in bad faith.
If your objective is to get out of this mess, I don't think explanations like "the word is shit because humanity sucks" are helpful. The explanation they are being pushed towards that choice by a perverse set of incentives is much more illuminating. Those incentives are controlled by one company - Google. That company could change them, either voluntarily or by being forced to.
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> that's on you to come up with an alternative Ads should be viable here. "The ad ecosystem is broken" is not something individuals should have to fix. And asking for an entire coffee for a quick tool is not really in line and unlikely to get many takers. And there's no good way to ask for microdonations.
Why "should" ads be viable? Here or in any context?
Ads, as long as they have not been banished from the world, should be viable in some form on a small useful site.
There are ideas about how to get rid of ads entirely, but I wanted to be more grounded to the current state of things for the purposes of that comment.
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> that's on you to come up with an alternative Ads should be viable here. "The ad ecosystem is broken" is not something individuals should have to fix. And asking for an entire coffee for a quick tool is not really in line and unlikely to get many takers. And there's no good way to ask for microdonations.
Google is selling surveillance not ads. Getting a static ad just like a magazine would be the natural fit for such a website. Bonus question: ads with tracking cost X, ads without cost Y. In actual numbers tell me how much more X is worth. 2Y, 10Y, 100Y? (There are studies on this)
Also my memory suggests 3x. But I'll go check.
Top result says 2.6x from ftc.gov but is from last decade.
Another result says "Targeted ads are twice more effective as non-targeted ads, and retargeted display ads encourage 1000 percent more people to search for a product." In response to that, I will note that even if google could not discern the site content at all, that would only affect targeting and not retargeting. So that suggests 2x at most in this situation.
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They provide curation to the ad buyers. Basically the marketplace is broken for both sides.
Could you elaborate please ? You got me intrested but I can't make anything of what you mean by "curation".
Basically they are in the business of providing human curated targeting parameters instead of the algorithm based that Google supplies.