Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#71

Post by cj » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #16

mattkevan wrote: post #7

For all the tiny violins that could be played about how life is getting harder for SEO practitioners, this marks a fundamental and very unwelcome change in the Web. Google have decided that it’s more profitable to keep people on its own site than redirecting them elsewhere, a big change in its contract. Before, it was ‘structure your site well and we’ll send you traffic’. Now it’s becoming, ‘structure your site well…

What kinds of searches are you thinking about? I like that I can google for the weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get an answer directly. The results page always has links if I care to dig deeper but 99% of the time I'd rather get the answer and move on.

An example of where Google's immediate answer just isn't good:

"how long does it take to get coronavirus test results"

Searching that, Google shows me a giant box with a red warning banner that says "COVID-19 alert". The box looks very authoritative, and in the box Google repeats back my question, and then provides an answer: 24 hours.

In the fine print, there's a link to a WebMD article (but when I click through, no where on WebMD does it say 24 hours).

The problem is that the actual turnaround time in my area (upstate new york) is 7-10 days to get results - according to a doctor who my Aunt got a test from yesterday.

This is far from an isolated case of showing bad information to an important question with too much authority.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#72

Post by dhosek » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #58

dhosek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the expression of the fact is copyrightable and Google is taking verbatim excerpts from websites and posting them on their site.

So if you enable this, do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere? Google helps you by actually giving you information you search without having to go through a SEOd webpage feeding tracking advertisers. You want to make copyright even more abusive and restrictive for what? Feeding scummy websites that exist to collect clicks for returning simple facts? We're n…

There is a concept of fair use, which is both frustratingly and wisely vaguely defined.

The relevant part of the doctrine is: >The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work. The court not only investigates whether the defendant's specific use of the work has significantly harmed the copyright owner's market, but also whether such uses in general, if widespread, would harm the potential market of the original. The burden of proof here rests on the copyright owner, who must demonstrate the impact of the infringement on commercial use of the work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Whether a website is scummy or not does not come into play. And frankly the stuff I'm seeing showing up in snippets in google search are very much wikipedia-type content (often exactly wikipedia-type content). And we're not talking snippets that provide context on the search result to enable determining whether this is the content that one is looking for, we're talking significant pieces of the content, often reformatted and presented in such a way that not clicking on the site is precisely the objective of the presentation.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#73

Post by doorty » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

I've become more disillusioned with search results over the years. In the earlier days of the web, It used to be you'd fine useful answers from thoughtful people. Now you find long winded SEO articles filled with adverts. I mean 10 pages of content for a simple recipe.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#74

Post by Klathmon » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

cj wrote: post #71

criddell wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kinds of searches are you thinking about? I like that I can google for the weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get an answer directly. The results page always has links if I care to dig deeper but 99% of the time I'd rather get the answer and move on.

An example of where Google's immediate answer just isn't good: "how long does it take to get coronavirus test results" Searching that, Google shows me a giant box with a red warning banner that says "COVID-19 alert". The box looks very authoritative, and in the box Google repeats back my question, and then provides an answer: 24 hours. In the fine print, there's a link to a WebMD article (but when I click through, no…

I tried the same thing and the answer was:

> It may take a lab about 24 hours to run your test. But you might not get your results for several days.

That seems pretty reasonable, and it in no way seems authoritative to me (it sounds like an estimate).

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#75

Post by mikro2nd » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #11

Yeah, just what've been saying for some time now. As Google is struggling for growth, it'll squeeze ad revenue off the extant web, turning it into a piece of shit even more than it is already. The same thing happened with eg. free PHPbb forum providers in early 2000s which were plastered with banner ads more and more (many mobile sites are like this already). I don't see a way that Google can win this race to the bot…

So time, then for a robots.txt with

  User-agent: Googlebot
  Disallow: /

?

(Of course one would have to find an exhaustive list of all the web-spiders they have and their UA strings, but you get my point...)

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#76

Post by mikro2nd » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #23

mc32 wrote: post #9

While keeping people on their platform is concerning and contrary to their prior position of getting out of the way of people’s information, I appreciate the snippets for one reason, I don’t have to worry about malware. Going to unknown sites is risky and even if not you may never the less get a clickjack telling people they are infected and need to click to clean up their system. It’s a no-win state.

That's not going to work either, in EU at least [1] (I wanted to link to a politico article but unfortunately they're using DoubleClick and I won't knowingly link to such sites anymore). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...

Or just mark Doubleclick as "untrusted" in NoScript? Along with gstatic, googletagmanager and a handful of the other common google domains, that is.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#77

Post by cj » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #74

cj wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example of where Google's immediate answer just isn't good: "how long does it take to get coronavirus test results" Searching that, Google shows me a giant box with a red warning banner that says "COVID-19 alert". The box looks very authoritative, and in the box Google repeats back my question, and then provides an answer: 24 hours. In the fine print, there's a link to a WebMD article (but when I click through, no…

I tried the same thing and the answer was: > It may take a lab about 24 hours to run your test. But you might not get your results for several days. That seems pretty reasonable, and it in no way seems authoritative to me (it sounds like an estimate).

Yes, if you read it carefully, it says "several days". I think most people searching will see 24 hours, and then click away without analyzing so carefully.

Several days is still far off from 7-10 days.

The point is, I'd much rather see a link to my county's official Covid-19 testing information site, rather than an arbitrary outdated snippet pulled from a WebMD article. Google's "best guess" answer is often pretty bad.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#78

Post by BoorishBears » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #49

BoorishBears wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two parts to this that you're unfairly combining There's what you don't like, and there's what you don't trust (in the computing security sense of the word). If you don't trust them to not do stuff that actually harms your computer, you shouldn't trust their content. The sites that serve most of the malware on the internet don't have stuff Google is going to quote in a search result... - Now there's the stuff…

> People will pay $5 for coffee from some random coffee shop they've never visited, but they won't pay 99 cents for an app someone put a few years of development into with 5 star reviews. This is a trope, but is it true? Maybe these spendy people buying all these $5 coffees are also buying apps and renting movies and looking at ads, while the cheapskates making drip at home are pirating and ad-blocking. Apple isn't m…

As someone who works in the mobile development industry I already knew it was true

But couldn't you do a quick search to find out for yourself?

https://www.businessinsider.com/just-2-of-app-installs-lead-...

I mean you're saying "tens of billions" like it's a large chunk but the same estimates showing 61 billion from all billing (not just app sales) are showing half a trillion dollars from the App Store alone in total

So yes, app sales are a pittance when it comes to the revenue the App Store generates, let alone what Apple generates.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#79

Post by bberenberg » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #64

impalallama wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mike Moloney runs FilterGrade, a marketplace for custom filters photographers use to edit their work. He gets most of his traffic from articles on his website, such as lens reviews and camera-related top 10 lists. Recently, he noticed Google pulling photos and text straight off the site and showing it at the top of search results. There’s a link to Moloney’s company at the bottom of the section, but clicking on any…

The site FilterGrade appears to resell the work of outside authors, taking a cut off the top instead of directing traffic to the original authors' own sites, which do exist. As usual, whenever you actually dig into these complaints it always turns out that the complainer is a galactic-scale leach doing something way sleazier than what they accuse search engines of doing.

You're saying every marketplace that doesn't require exclusive content is a leech?

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#80

Post by jdofaz » Mon, Jul 13, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

cj wrote: post #71

criddell wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kinds of searches are you thinking about? I like that I can google for the weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get an answer directly. The results page always has links if I care to dig deeper but 99% of the time I'd rather get the answer and move on.

An example of where Google's immediate answer just isn't good: "how long does it take to get coronavirus test results" Searching that, Google shows me a giant box with a red warning banner that says "COVID-19 alert". The box looks very authoritative, and in the box Google repeats back my question, and then provides an answer: 24 hours. In the fine print, there's a link to a WebMD article (but when I click through, no…

>(but when I click through, no where on WebMD does it say 24 hours).

It doesn't show it until you click on "How Long Do Test Results Take?" or View All