The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
billdembski.substack.com
The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
#2[deleted]
Re: The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
#3According to the article, the evil Google has made life harder for affiliate marketing industry, SEO industry, alternative medicine sites... Well, Google has certainly made quite a few unpleasant things, but mentioning these as examples makes it hard for me to sympathize the author's case.
(Added:) Allegations of Google's manipulating the search results to influence voting behavior are much more interesting.
Re: The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
#4so OP does SEO and also complains about google being evil. I have no sympathy for someone doing SEO to basically ruin the "organic" results and then complain about how google controls the results. So what, you want to control the result for profit instead of them?
Re: The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
#5According to the article, the evil Google has made life harder for affiliate marketing industry, SEO industry, alternative medicine sites... Well, Google has certainly made quite a few unpleasant things, but mentioning these as examples makes it hard for me to sympathize the author's case. (Added:) Allegations of Google's manipulating the search results to influence voting behavior are much more interesting.
yeah it's like hes complaining about them being evil better then he is able to. lol.
Re: The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
#6According to the article, the evil Google has made life harder for affiliate marketing industry, SEO industry, alternative medicine sites... Well, Google has certainly made quite a few unpleasant things, but mentioning these as examples makes it hard for me to sympathize the author's case. (Added:) Allegations of Google's manipulating the search results to influence voting behavior are much more interesting.
Idk how someone wouldn't mention the way they exercise monopoly power or data collection etc...
Re: The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
#7It's arguable that the worst thing Google has done is be the ultimate fruition of the ad model.
Most people are so accustomed to "free" services from google, that they don't even see it as transactional, but rather as exploitive. "I'm trying to watch my youtube videos, and google keeps shoving these ads in my face. Google, please fuck off!" or "I'm trying to organize my business expenses but Google sheets won't load. Where is your god damn support!?!"
Google put themselves in a position where they can only be evil, because the vast majority of people (the author here included), just will not be able to step back and see what google is, and weigh it against alternates. Google is bad for leeching off my right to a private gmail account, but they are not good for saving me $5/mo for email...e-mail is free. Everyone knows that.
Even worse, if Google were to turn into a paid services company, they would be even more evil for cutting off the millions, sorry, billions of poor users who don't have the money to pay for all that google offers. The backlash against youtube red was immense (that was its unfortunate launch name) and even today people still see youtube premium as an evil thing.
So sure, google does evil things, but it should be stated within the framework of their business model, rather than being unaware or ignoring it.
Re: The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
#8> Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two nerds who left Stanford before getting their master’s degrees to found Google, were at the start endearing.
> If you run your eyes down this list, you’ll see that Google and YouTube together, which are both owned by Alphabet, have twice the traffic of the next eighteen sites combined—over 200 billion visits per month for Google and YouTube.
It's interesting how the founding mythos gets compressed by time to omit key details: https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
This is also why the whole debate about Alphabet/Google profiling and spying on users is just an incidental detail and at best a distraction from the real mechanism, which is to incentivize everyone making as many network connections as possible all the time. The network itself is what does the analysis, like Room 641A and friends. It's all about that metadata. Contents don't really matter.
When the product people get things like “message-send causes notification on recipient's phone” to be realtime-enough, even a single type of metadata like “this IP address made a network connection at this time” will be enough to eventually filter a person's complete social network out of a large enough timespan of metadata collection.
Re: The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
#9According to the article, the evil Google has made life harder for affiliate marketing industry, SEO industry, alternative medicine sites... Well, Google has certainly made quite a few unpleasant things, but mentioning these as examples makes it hard for me to sympathize the author's case. (Added:) Allegations of Google's manipulating the search results to influence voting behavior are much more interesting.
I was involved with a group of SEO enthusiasts around 2010 or so, even then most of them were moving away from SEO towards buying ads on Google which is what Google wanted them to do.
The most remarkable difference was that you can make incremental A/B styles on an Adsense campaign but you can't do that with SEO not least because Google has patented methods to cause your rankings to go haywire whenever you change anything about your site -- one reason why sites like Reddit can go a decade without a major design refresh, if you've got a site which does well you want to keep growing it but whatever you do don't change the link structure.
SEO is a matter of investing in content and link building to get traffic, since Google is in the business of selling traffic, they don't want you to invest in anything other than Adsense. It's like how Facebook doesn't give commercial entities a lot of visibility unless the pay up. I remember when Zynga games got huge with games that would spam you about everything your friends were doing so you'd want to play and back then Zynga was making big $$ and Facebook nothing but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg but a stop to that.
Re: The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
#10so OP does SEO and also complains about google being evil. I have no sympathy for someone doing SEO to basically ruin the "organic" results and then complain about how google controls the results. So what, you want to control the result for profit instead of them?
SEO has multiple faces. The average real estate agent would come to an SEO and wish they could sprinkle some pixie dust on a site for sore eyes and get people to come. A good SEO will say, "Look, write a good blog about things going on in your town and you'll become the #1 real estate agent in your town" and they'll say "I can't do that", and the SEO will say "You make enough in one commission to hire somebody part time to write it for a year."
The big story of the last five years is that Google has decided to let certain entities win permanently in certain areas. There used to be a lot of competition in review sites, some were good, some where bad, now Forbes dominates reviews in almost everything and they're atrocious
https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/
On one level SEO can just be a matter of search engine compatibility. So many sites are built without any thought about how they'll interact with web crawlers.