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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)

#521
post #71

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…

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!

That and acquisition of a direct competitor who has beat a larger company. If you lose a competition, you should fall behind. Losing a competition and then forking out cash to make the leader switch teams before he crosses the finish line is a complete perversion of the game

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

#522
You decided to ruin a perfectly good website by adding ads. Google did not force you to do that and the enshittification required to get Google to approve the ads is peanuts compared to the ads themselves.

> I'm willing to sell people unregulated erectile dysfunction medication or tell them about sexy singles in their area, but tricking people into downloading viruses is a bit too far.

"Legit" ads can have much worse outcomes on people's lives than downloading a virus.

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find myself using yandex more and more. They’re like old Google, but obviously based in Russia. https://www.americanfastener.com/tap-and-drill-size-chart/ That was the first result.

Unfortunately, yandex is destined to fade into irrelevance for the reasons that has nothing to do with the tech.

Can you elaborate?

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

#524
post #444
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also changed "did you mean Y" into "showing results for Y". So annoying.

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

#525

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…

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?

We are working towards this if you'd like to get in touch. I feel like "web3" as an interface/discovery platform is a very good topic.

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

#526
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator? Political ads? Campaign ads? Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news? People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.

Cool, so sell to any one of those directly. I mean, the revenue from the site now must be terrible anyway. So if there us the value you suggest, it should be an easy sell. Probably less work than he went to to tweak the site. Then again, are people investigating vote targets undecided voters? And good luck getting media to advertise....

Indeed, selling ads like this directly is the old school way of doing it.

But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.

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

#527

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…

> borg controlling the internet

Not sure if this was an intentional pun or you are more right than you realize...

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

#528
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?

But this isn't about “images of X”. Nor is it, likely, about whatever "listicle" links OP's site has[1]. It's about people serching for info about, say, "Day at Nürburgring". And OP didn't remove that, now did they? And I bet most of them don't specify either with or without listicles.

So if people were searching for "Day at Nürburgring" and used to find OP's site, then Google changed their algorithm, and now when people search for "Day at Nürburgring" they don't find OP's site, how is that not Google’s fault?

______

[1]: And Bog knows Google serves me up enough sites with those on...

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

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does that extra information come from a separate process than the LLM network? If not then, assuming the same output is not guaranteed from the same input as per usual, then all bets are off correct?

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

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

But this isn't about “images of X”. Nor is it, likely, about whatever "listicle" links OP's site has[1]. It's about people serching for info about, say, "Day at Nürburgring". And OP didn't remove that, now did they? And I bet most of them don't specify either with or without listicles. So if people were searching for "Day at Nürburgring" and used to find OP's site, then Google changed their algorithm, and now when pe…

You can't say what it's about without seeing exactly where the traffic and rankings decreased and looking at the Google search console. I'm happy to take a look out of curiosity if the OP wants to share.
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