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Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

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

#81
post #66
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like ads and affiliate links. https://www.runnaroo.com/privacy

I didn’t see that. That’s worrying. A y idea if they’re related to Brave, by any chance?

I didn’t see that. That’s worrying. Any idea if they’re related to Brave, by any chance?

I'm the creator of Runnaroo.

Nope, not related to Brave, but there maybe conversations soon to add Runnaroo as one of the default search options in Brave.

We are exploring different ways to monetize, and wanted to make possible options upfront in the privacy policy. I am always open to feedback or suggestions. Whatever direction we end up going, the core focus is always preserving user privacy.

Is there any specific reason affiliate links are worrying? It is currently one of the main ways DuckDuckGo monetizes

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

#82
post #58
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…

> do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere?

You can't see how me quoting a line from a movie and Google reproducing tracts of content verbatim might be of different type?

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

#83
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm saying that if an SEO guy who resells third-party software is complaining that Google is cutting them out of the deal, the SEO guy is a hypocrite.

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

#84
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? If I was the 800 pound search engine throwing my weight around to quote a sentence from a movie or book, then yes, maybe I should be fined--or at least required to offer compensation. I think there's a difference between a company with billions in revenue doing it versus "you". > Google helps…

> If I was the 800 pound search engine throwing my weight around to quote a sentence from a movie or book, then yes, maybe I should be fined--or at least required to offer compensation.

Except that the (current American) law doesn't work that way - the 800 pound gorillas use their billions to pay lawyers to abuse small creators and outlets based on such creative interpretations of copyright laws. The gorillas are capable of fighting a copyright battle at court over details while they can just abuse the same right into some individuals bankrupcy.

Giving them even more power over your expression is incredibly harmful to society.

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

#85
post #72
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wheth…

The problem is that you need to fight for that fair use in the court with huge amounts of money.

When was the last time you've seen an individual or small company win a fair use case against YouTubes abusive algorithm? Because the created content gets taken down constantly even if its fair use. The algorithm doesn't care... and neither do giant copyright holding corporations that issue automated frivolous takedowns.

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

#86

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…

Google is becoming an AI engine. You type in "How to clean a wound?" and it tells you how. You type in "How to price an option contract?", and it tells you. Forget about GPT-3, Google is the real deal. If they're able to continue executing on this vision, the sky's the limit.

These type of queries seem to have become the exception. Google is still useful if you're trying to find a product you want to buy. Maybe.

Occasionally I'll get lucky with a hyper-specific query that hasn't been SEO to shit, but otherwise Google search has become a glorified Yellow Pages.

Far from being AI, I've watched Google search get dumber with time.

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

#87
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> websites that create the content have just lost 99% of your page views to Google No because less than 100% of my searches are for questions with simple answers. Part of the reason getting an answer quickly from Google is so appealing is because the sources that Google uses seem to be hostile to their audience. I use Google Fi and pay $10 / GB for my data which means your ad heavy page may cost me more in bandwidth…

>Do you think newsreaders are as evil as Google? I use NetNewsWire on my tablet and very few of the feeds I subscribe to show any ads and I rarely click through to the source. I haven't used an RSS reader in a while, so I may be wrong on this but: 1) Last I remembered content creators could still place ads that are displayed through the reader, so it's not a complete loss if you don't click through. 2) NetNewsWire is…

In the long term, basic facts will be table stakes for anything that wants to answer questions.

Think about Amazon's Echo, Apple's Siri, or the Google Assistant. You can ask any of them about weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get basic factual answers. I would expect digital assistants to be able to handle queries of much greater complexity in the future and I would expect google.com to keep up with that. If they make the user experience great, users will keep using Google and if that's where the users are, then that's where publishers will want to be as well.

The barrier to switching search engines is ridiculously low. If Google starts to make decisions that are bad for users (and I would consider forcing users to click through to a weather site a bad idea) then they will switch to a better search engine.

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

#88

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...)

They could just ignore it, right? Or do any new rules actually require honoring robots.txt?

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

#89
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm saying that if an SEO guy who resells third-party software is complaining that Google is cutting them out of the deal, the SEO guy is a hypocrite.

I don't understand why you think he's an SEO guy? Is he scraping content to build his marketplace without seller consent? Would Etsy be an SEO guy in your mind?

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

#90

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…

>life is getting harder for SEO practitioners

waiting for the boomers on this site to realize how much youtube has turned into google search seo spam

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